Pun
A
pun (also known as
paronomasia) is a humorous
figure of speech. Walter Redfern (in
Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) succinctly said: "To pun is to make love to the Locarno Treaty".
In order to be able to pun effectively it is necessary that a
language must include homonyms which may readily be misrepresented as synonyms. Languages with complex gender or case structures tend not to facilitate this, although puns can be constructed in all languages with varying degrees of difficulty; i.e. puns are said to be easy to construct in languages such as Chinese or English, but rarer in Russian.
The word
pun itself is thought to be originally a contraction of the (now archaic)
pundigrion. This latter term is thought to have originated from
punctilious, which itself derived from the
Italian puntiglio (originally meaning "a fine point"), diminutive of
punto, "point", from the Latin
punctus, past participle of
pungere, "to prick." These etymological sources are reported in the
Oxford English Dictionary, which nonetheless labels them "conjecture".
Puns can be subdivided into several varieties:
*
Homographic puns exploit the difference in meanings of words which look alike (and usually sound alike).
For example: "Being in
politics is just like playing
golf: you are trapped in one bad
lie after another." (Pun on the two meanings of
lie - "a deliberate untruth"/"the position in which something rests").
*Homographic puns which exploit the difference in meanings of words which look alike but have
different pronunciations are technically
Heteronymic, though this distinction is disused.
For example: "Q: What instrument do fish like to play? A: A
bass guitar." (Pun on the identical spelling of
/beıs/ (low frequency), and
/bæs/ (a kind of fish)).
*
Homophonic puns exploit the difference in meanings of words which sound alike but have different spellings.
For example, "I've no idea how worms reproduce but you often find them in
/pers/." (Pun on the identical pronunciation of
"pears" and
"pairs").
*
Double-sound, where words which are similar but not identical are intentionally confused.
For example: "What do you call an
inverse chicken?
Poultry." (Pun on the similar-sounding "poultry" and "poetry" where "poetry" is derived from an alternative reading of "inverse" as two words, "in verse," alluding to poetry).
Homographic puns are sometimes compared to the
stylistic device antanaclasis; homophonic puns, to
polyptoton; but they are not identical.
The
compound pun is one in which multiple puns are colocated for additional and amplified effect. Examples of this are the following:
Three brothers asked their mother to think of a name for their
cattle-
ranch. She suggested
Focus Ranch, which rather puzzled them until she explained that "'Focus' means where the
sun's rays meet (sons raise meat)."
A sign in a golf-cart shop reads "When drinking, don't drive. Don't even putt." (The puns are on "driving" and "putting" a golf ball, vs. "driving" a car or "putting" around in a golf cart.)
The last exchange of a
knock knock joke runs: Q: "Eskimo Christian Italian who?" A: "Eskimo Christian Italian no lies." (The pun, involving an indeterminate number of sub-puns, is on the phrase "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies".)
Extended puns occur when multiple puns referring to one general idea are used throughout a longer utterance. An example of this is the following story about a fight, with extended puns about cookery:
A fight broke out in a kitchen.
Egged on by the waiters, two cooks
peppered each other with punches. One man, a
greasy foie gras specialist,
ducked the first blows, but his
goose was cooked when the other
cold-cocked him. The man who
beet him, a
weedy salad expert with big
cauliflower ears, tried to flee the scene, but was
cornered in the
maize of tables by a
husky off-duty
cob. He was charged with
a salt and battery. He claims to look forward to the suit, as he's always wanted to be a
sous-chef.
Or this one about various lower life forms:
I
moss say I'm taking a
lichen to that
fun-gi, even though his jokes are in
spore taste.
Algae the first to say that they
mushroom out of control.
A
Discrete Anti-contextual Pun refers to two different situations, or contexts, by using a word or phrase that may have two or more meanings, but only one of which makes sense in the context. For example: If you are talking to your friend on his cell phone, and the call is dropped, he may say to you later, "sorry, no room service." This pun refers to the fact that he has no service to his cell phone in his room, and he also does not have room-service (referring to food being delivered to his room via a phone call).
Multi-functional layered ironic Pun: The above pun can also fit into this prestigious category of pun because in order to get room-service (the food), he must make a phone call, which he cannot make because he has no room service (cell phone service).
Humor is the most common intent of puns in recent times. It is a form particularly admired in Britain, and forms a core element of the British cult comedy show
I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue. The late
Richard Whiteley was famed for his dextrous use of puns as host of the UK words and numbers game show
Countdown.
While generally eschewed in more formal settings, puns of greater or lesser subtlety are employed to good effect by many popular artists and writers. For example, names based on puns (such as calling
Justin Thyme a character who is always almost late) can be found in
Piers Anthony's
Xanth novels,
The Eyre Affair,
Asterix,
Hamlet,
The Simpsons, the
Carmen Sandiego computer games, and just about everything
Spider Robinson has ever written, especially the
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series.
In music, puns often find their way into
hip hop/rap music.
How Soon Is Now? by English rock band
The Smiths features the lyric:
"I am the son, and the heir."
(pun on son/sun and heir/air)
In addition to works of popular culture, puns are also found in "serious" literature. See
Alexander Pope,
James Joyce,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Robert Bloch, and others like Sing money discussed under
word play. In the past, the serious pun was an important and standard rhetorical or poetic device, as in
Shakespeare's
Richard III:
"made glorious summer by this son of York"
(pun on homophony of "son" and "sun")
John Donne is another who used serious puns in his work. For instance, he puns repeatedly on his own name (which is pronounced "Dun") in his poem "A Hymn to God the Father". Twice after imploring God to forgive certain kinds of sins and weaknesses, he ends a stanza by saying:
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,::
For I have more.One interpretation could be that Donne is saying, "God, when you have forgiven me this much, you are not done (finished)/you do not have John Donne (safe yet), for I have more sins to confess." (Some think the last line is a pun on the name of Donne's wife, Ann More. This does not fit Donne's meaning, however.) In the third stanza, having received assurance, counteracting his fears,
that at my death Thy Son:
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore(another Son/sun pun), he ends the poem:
And having done that, Thou hast done;::
I fear no more.A
biblical pun of serious intent is found in
Matthew 16.18:
"Thou art Peter [Greek Πετρος, Petros], and upon this rock [Greek πετρα, petra] I will build my church."
(pun on the double meaning of petros/Petros: in the first part of the sentence the word appears to stand for a personal name, but in the second, petra ("rock") makes the listener reevaluate the first petros as its second meaning, "stone"). However, Jesus would have said this in Aramaic where instead of the Greek Petros it would have been Cephas as the name and also the Aramaic word for rock. This has actually been presented as circumstantial evidence that the passage was originally invented, years after Jesus' death, by a Greek-speaking author.
The humorous writer
Terry Pratchett refers to puns as
a pune, or play on words in his
Discworld novels.
Often enough, puns are created without the knowledge of the speaker. For example, a
television show once depicted a man who had been impaled by an
anchor. When interviewed, the surgeon who performed the operation used the common phrase, "He sailed through it" (meaning that the operation was easy), which is a pun given that an anchor is used during literal sailing. If such spontaneous punnery is noticed, it is often followed by the apologetic phrase:
"no pun intended".
European
heraldry contains the technique of
canting arms, which can be considered punning.
Visual puns, in which the image is at odds with the inscription, are also common in Dutch
gable stones as well as in
cartoons such as
Lost Consonants or
The Far Side.
Even in the most dire of situations, humor is often appropriate. The foremost example of this is the writer
Robert Bloch, author of such work as
Psycho (the book before the movie). Even in the infamous
shower scene, Bloch slips in a pun with the butcher knife, both cutting through Marion's peace of mind (and a good deal more). One excerpt, as the knife descends, reads "First, it cut off her scream...then her head." No other writer has come as close in merging
humor and
horror, as numerous examples of his work show.
Russian
NBA player
Andrei Kirilenko has chosen to wear the number 47, unusual in the NBA, on his gear, because of the coincidence that his initials together with this number form the abbreviation
AK-47, the name of the famous Russian rifle, named after its inventor and the year it was invented (Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947).
Official puns are rare, but there are a few:
*
K-9, pronounced "
canine", for war dogs or police dogs follows the military pattern of designations, such as
G-2.
* "Curb your dog", the command on former
New York City street signs that combined a requirement to leash a dog with a requirement that dogs be taken to the gutter for
defecation. (The signs were replaced after
pooper scooper laws were passed.)
* The
US 4th Infantry Division patch has four
ivy leaves on it, from the
Roman numeral for 4,
IV. (This may be an example of
canting arms; see above.) The German
Flakgruppe Wachtel suggested as an emblem
W/
8,
achtel being German for eighth.
* Although the
amphibious military truck called a
DUKW may appear to have a punning name, in fact the designation follows standard General Motors truck model designations from the
World War II period.
*
RU 21 for the Russian chemical that allegedly allowed
KGB agents to drink extreme amounts of alcohol without having a
hangover. This spells the question "Are you twenty-one?", which is the question one could get when trying to buy alcohol in some states of the
USA.
Numerous pun formats exist:
*
Tom Swifty*
Spoonerism*
Knock-knock joke*
Shaggy dog story*
Daffynition*
Transpositional pun*
Bilingual pun*
MalapropismWhile puns exist (in practice) in most language-using cultures, their acceptability and reception vary from one to the next, much like how belching is offensive in the US, but a compliment in Mongolia, or how European men cross their legs at the ankles; Americans ankle-to-knee. For example, in Japan puns are considered a generic form of humor. In some segments of American culture, puns are seen either as offensive and insulting, as a means of asserting oneself intellectually in conversation; yet, in other parts the pun is regarded as an important rhetorical tool, spawning national pun competitions such as the long-running annual
O. Henry Pun-Off in
Austin, Texas.
One reason the pun is sometimes seen as having a negative context is that one can be perceived as a deceptive act against the listener, who is led (when the pun is delivered deadpan and unexpectedly) to believe that a given piece of information is being offered, only to discover that he has been fooled. The intellectual component of more obscure puns leads some people and cultures to see them as saying "I have special power over language and have tricked you, ergo I am smarter than you". This also feeds into its position in some intellectual circles as a sort of means of establishing dominance over one's peers.
:Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water. -- Dave Barry,
Why Humor Is FunnyThe word "pun" is used with a slightly different sense in some
computer science and
hacking cultures to indicate a term with multiple meanings. For example it might be said that the + operator is punned for string concatenation (in this case, it refers to
operator overloading).
Sometimes, mutually coincidental elements in situations (e.g. two situations with similar sounding words) can prompt coinage for a pun. One example can be
backronyms and other nonsensically coined words.
*
Anagram*
Antanaclasis*
dajare (puns in Japanese)
*
Forster's Syndrome*
Humor*
Insult*
Letter game*
Mondegreen*
Neologism*
Palindrome*
Polyptoton*
Portmanteau:*
List of portmanteaus*
Riddle* "The pun is mightier than the sword." —
James Joyce in ???
* "As different as York from Leeds" —
James Joyce in
Finnegans Wake, a play on "As different as chalk from cheese".
* "A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket." — John Dennis, 1781
* "He that would pun, would pick a pocket" —
Alexander Pope, punster
* "Blunt and I made atrocious puns. I believe, indeed, that Miss Blunt herself made a little punkin, as I called it" —
Henry James*
"Pun (
n.): the lowest form of humour" —
Samuel Johnson,
lexicographer** "Puns are the last refuge of the witless." —another way of stating the above
** "…but the height of wit." —common rebuttal to the above
** "A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself. — Doug Larson
* "A bun is the lowest form of wheat" —Anon.
* "The eleventh pun always gets a laugh, even if no pun in ten did." —Anon.
* "Heralds don't pun; they cant."
SCA heralds' expression
* "Immanuel doesn't pun; he Kant."
* "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." —
Fred Allen* "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." — Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849
* "A good pun is its own reword." — Anon.
*
The pun as a figure of speech*
On the relative (un)translatability of puns*
Pun of the Day*
PunGents*
PunLiners.com*
O. Henry Pun-Off annual competition in Austin, Texas (punPUNpun.com)
