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It is, I suppose, a kind of relief that no matter what is going on in the world, people are making puns. Here is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a co-founder of this magazine, in 1857, when famously nothing was happening:
Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man’s laughter, which is the end of the other.
(I just saw this pun in the new The Naked Gun. Liam Neeson’s delivery helped it considerably.)
Holmes goes on to add that “a pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”
I should say, before we get any further, that I love puns. The humorist and political scientist Stephen Leacock wrote that “the inveterate punster” follows “conversation as a shark follows a ship.” Well, I am that shark. It has prevented me from having as many chums as I would like. (I have made this pun before, and I’ll make it again!)
One difficulty with trying to track the progress of punsters through this magazine’s pages is that puns are, by definition, somewhat hostile to text-searching. Indeed, that hostility was the subject of a story by David R. Wheeler in 2011 (“‘Google Doesn’t Laugh’: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO”), although the trend might have pleased James Fallows in 2007 (“Generally I Look Down on Headlines With Puns”). People making puns don’t always announce that they are making puns, the way people trying to bribe you don’t always state their intentions outright as they hand you a chip bag full of cash.
Fortunately for pun hunters, ever since The Atlantic began, it has been full of people denouncing puns, and full of people making them. Sometimes—as in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—they even manage to do both at the same time. The denunciations and defenses range from the terse (a 1968 reviewer of something called the Treasury of Atrocious Puns noted: “‘Treasury’ is the wrong word”) to the lengthy (Walter Prichard Eaton’s 1932 “On Groaning at Puns”). Eaton even singled out Holmes for using so much wordplay: “Here, and in England, they endured—nay, they enjoyed—a barrage of mechanical puns from stage and platform and press till the nineteenth century was well past its meridian. Tom Taylor in England, Oliver Wendell Holmes here, not only escaped public wrath, but waxed in purse and reputation.”
Unlike Holmes, Eaton was courageous enough to proclaim that he actually enjoyed puns, as he traced the history of groaning at them. “In the good old days of my favorite author, Artemus Ward, the pun was in high favor,” he recalled. “Artemus said you’d know his house in Brooklyn because it had a cupola and a mortgage on it. He also said that the pretty girls of Utah mostly married Young.” You get the idea. Eaton lamented that in the 1890s, puns fell out of favor as a “weapon of humor” on the stage and the page. By his own decade, he complained, the pun was no better than a “wise-crack,” subject to groans and exasperation.
It can’t have helped the status of puns that some of the people going all-in on them were Nazis. In “Dr. Goebbels’s Awkward Squad,” John O. Rennie described listening to the limp, miserable attempts at puns broadcast to North American radios as part of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda efforts during World War II. “The German, having adopted the tank, the plane, and the submarine, counts it a mere stroke of the pen to match or excel the native humor of England or the Tinted States,” Rennie noted in 1943. “His faith in the parody or the pun is based on the honest conviction that he can master the intricacies of any foreign language so neatly as to astound even the natives.”
This conviction was not borne out by the facts. One such example: the two “Friendly Quarrelers” Fritz and Fred, who delivered an unrelenting barrage of groaner after groaner. “FRED: That’s all lies. FRITZ: Exactly. That is why they call themselves Allies.” (Rennie, required to monitor these programs, said he was convinced that “the comedy output from Berlin” was “designed primarily to destroy the morale of monitors like himself.”)
Humor can be a particularly perishable form of writing, so I am thrilled, like an archaeologist able to eat honey from a sarcophagus, every time a pun holds up. “A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters,” some 1861 humor by Holmes (again), contains a few puns that have aged remarkably well. Although he made the mistake of declaring that the Asylum does not accept women because “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FEMALE PUNSTER”—an unthinkable claim for anybody who has had to interact with me—he also makes one of my favorite puns. Describing the outcome of the 1860 presidential election, in which Stephen A. Douglas lost to Abraham Lincoln, Holmes wrote: “‘Why is Douglas like the earth?’ … ‘Because he was flattened out at the polls!’”
Not bad, right? Much better than his other one about someone who knocks on a door with his stick instead of ringing, and the person who answers says that he sees “you prefer Cane to A bell.”
Suddenly catching sight of a good pun feels just like what Alan Bennett described in The History Boys: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” (And then that hand slaps yours and says, “Women aren’t punsters!”)
