Frisking the Governor’s Daughter: On Puns

[An essay I had in an anthology, Vocabula Bound, about ten years ago. I've tinkered a little, not too much. --J.K.]

It was one of those fateful moments a father never forgets. My daughter Christy, twelve or thirteen years old, was having her friend Yvonne over to spend the night. The three of us were sitting at the table, getting ready to play some kind of board game, and Yvonne started demonstrating her trick thumb. It was genuinely “double,” and she could bend it way back toward her wrist. I felt a little prickling at the back of my neck. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I had been handed a chance to tell the mother of all dad jokes. “Yvonne,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “What’s a joint like this doing in a nice girl like you?”

Ba-dum-tum!

There was a chicken that dreamed of being a ballerina. Everyone laughed, discouraged her. But she practiced, she took lessons, she read books. She suffered for her art. Finally the night of her debut came, and it was a triumph! One critic said she was sheer poultry in motion.

Ba-da-ba-da-bum!

Humblest of tropes, the paronomasia  — "pun" to its siblings and golf buddies — typically earns not an appreciative chuckle but a groan of pain. It can inspire Bronx cheers or mock insults, like John Dennis's declaration that "The man who would make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket," an upside-down compliment that seems, nonetheless, founded in real annoyance. Clearly we think the punster has somehow cheated, though in a way merely foolish and petty, childish perhaps but not evil. What could lie at the root of this feeling? The answer, I think, has to do with the basic nature of listening: with the mental gymnastics we routinely perform, without quite knowing it, in order to understand even the simplest phrase. Unjustly despised, the pun turns out to be surprisingly profound, not a silly game with language but an emblem of its inmost nature.

Consider what happens in ordinary conversation: we encode meaning, launch speech into the uncertain air, snatch it back out, and then decode it back into meaning again — all, of course, without paying much more attention to what we are doing than to our circulation or digestion. In English, forty-some phonemes are combined and recombined to render a vocabulary that may range (for an adult) from forty to eighty thousand words, words that are combined and recombined in their turn to form an essentially infinite number of phrases and sentences. The task of the speaker is daunting enough: finding the right words in the huge storehouse of her verbal memory, working out the intricate grammatical relationships that will truly represent what she is thinking, then producing the right phonemes in the right order. But the task of the listener seems worse by an order of magnitude: he must identify each phoneme in an uninterrupted stream, parse the flow into words, match the words to meanings, then parse the words into sentences, often enough working with data that has been corrupted by noise or poor pronunciation or poor hearing. How can it be done?

The solution, it seems, is a massively redundant system of inference and apperception. As the sounds come pouring in over the transom, all unidentified and meaningless during the first nanoseconds, different teams of brain cells spring into action. Each team is intent on applying its own methodology, yet all of them are eager to collaborate. The committee in charge of phoneme-decoding has its work continuously checked by the word-recognition gang, which is checked in turn by the grammar-and-syntax group, which busily exchanges emails with the Board on What Makes Sense in This Context Anyway. Tone and expression are continuously monitored. Past experience is checked in real time. Reasonable hypotheses about what a sound or word or phrase might be are tested again and again, and often rival hypotheses coexist for seconds at a time, during the unspooling of whole words, phrases, and clauses. The key to the system is the simultaneous pursuit of meaning along many different routes.

Thus a preliminary finding of wives' dress will be instantly revised to wife's dress, in the quickest of consultations between the hearing team and the visualization subcommittee. Two funny is effortlessly reprocessed to too funny, kunfterbul unmangled to comfortable, and munce accepted for months. Too big for his bridges may call for a short conference before britches is substituted, and there will be a brief huddle by the water-cooler before and curse away is suppressed in favor of Anchors aweigh!, on the urging of the intonation experts, after a grudging confession by the phoneme group that the d was conjectural all along. (The context people smile sardonically, not even bothering to point out that the topic, after all, is your upcoming cruise.) Higher level deduction comes into play early and remains engaged for the duration. You decide on semantic grounds how to bracket the modifiers in pretty old woman or (to use Lewis Carroll's example) mock turtle soup. You decide whether great deal means "a bargain" or precisely the opposite. You accept a finding of I'm glad you could make it, then scan for irony, and for larger implications in general; and all these determinations help you decipher the next sound and the one after.

Linguists like to illustrate the recursive nature of the process by quoting a wonderfully goofy dyad attributed to Groucho Marx:

Truth flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Groucho's quip — a pun, if you like — shows that language even on a very basic level is a chicken–egg problem: you can't understand the part (whether "flies" is a noun or a verb, "like" a verb or a preposition) until you understand the whole and vice versa. It follows that the Unconscious Language Decoder that comes standard with every Homo sapiens must be working by trial and error, testing "flies" as a verb, going back when that doesn't work to try it as a noun, and so on. Normal listening, it seems, requires that multiple and sharply different hypotheses be entertained simultaneously; but it also requires the speedy, unconscious suppression of meaning after meaning in favor of the one that is wanted.

Both requirements result from the inescapable vagueness of words — the tantalizing slipperiness, always somehow surprising, that enables them to keep catching new meanings rather than merely repeating the old. Rose means not just this flower here, but those three on the next bush, and the five on the one next to that, and the one in oil at the museum. More to the point where puns are concerned, it means "got out of bed" and "swelled up in the oven" and “succeeded professionally”; and the identical sound can mean "repeated lines" or "pushes through the water using paddles" or "plaintiffs in a series of imaginary future Supreme Court cases" or even "belonging to the egg-mass of a lobster," and all this must be sorted out somehow, in far less than a second, while you smile and jingle your keys, already planning your reply.

What happens in a pun is that two rival interpretations cross the finish line into consciousness in a dead heat, equally confirmed and unconfirmed; or a legitimately rejected meaning is resurrected at the last instant, creating an irresistible sensation of unfair dealing. I sometimes have occasion to demand of college students that they "remember a riddle." Most often they recall this one:

Q: What's black and white and read all over?
A: A newspaper.

The key to this childish "catch" is that the context committee rules out "read" in favor of "red" very early, and with such emphatic confidence that even adults are usually unable to answer the riddle if they have not heard it before. Once enlightened, they react with pique because the difficulty has been so shamelessly contrived, and because the alpha meaning we have been laboring to construct — a sunburned zebra, perhaps — has to be scrapped completely in favor of the beta meaning that deposes it. Children recoup their humiliation, with interest, by retelling the riddle several times; adults peer over their half-lenses and sniff. But the victim's annoyed sense of having been tripped up pointlessly is an element shared by far wittier and more artful puns, where it makes us moan and shake our heads even as we are laughing and not-so-secretly admiring the punster. I thought of that long ago, and dismissed it; how dare you! Some such sentiment explains the indignation that mingles with our pleasure.

One key to the pun's low status, then, is that in a sense language puns by default. Even the simplest phrase summons all kinds of incongruous possibilities that remain glued together until they are methodically unstuck and sorted through, albeit at lightning speed. Much of one's effort, at the level of unconscious processing, is to get words and phrases unpunned, darting through the maze of malapropisms and unwanted secondary meanings to some approximation of the thing meant. Thus the pun seems retrograde and anarchic, an act of sabotage against the team effort of communication, or at best a piece of shoddy, unfinished work. No matter how cleverly it has been arranged, it tends to feel like a clumsy failure of the meaning-making or meaning-finding software.

Or it does for an instant, anyway; an instant later, recognizing art and intention, we begin to take a sheepish pleasure in what amounts to a language lesson. Though rarely the strongest element in our response, our laughter then may be the noblest, as it stems from neither ego nor libido, but the pure impulse to explore language for its own sake; it has a kind of altruistic or scholarly quality. Children's jokes are full of such mild humor. "Why did Santa plant a garden?" "So he could hoe, hoe, hoe." If that cracks you up, you are probably eight. Go read something else.

But proof that language puns by default is that some of the funniest puns really are accidents. The following were all headlines in 2003:

Crack Found on Governor's Daughter

Miners Refuse to Work After Death

Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Hospital Sued by 7 Foot Doctors

Part of the charm of these is their inadvertence: in contrast to the mean little newspaper riddle, the perpetrator rather than the listener takes the pratfall. Moreover, in each case, the insurgent beta meaning sets loose outlaw fantasies that prove much more intriguing than the anticipated alpha meaning. These factors keep the groan quotient relatively low; still, the core of each jest is malfunction. In every case, we can go back and deduce what was really meant, but by then the game is up: the decoding process has broken down, and we are doing consciously, at a glacial pace, what should be done by the unconscious at warp speed. Notice in any case that punniness (perhaps I should say punishment) is the given. What logicians call (wait for it) "disambiguation" cannot be taken for granted but requires a positive effort, one that headline writers are not always able to manage in their cramped spaces.

In the pun per se, the punster pretends to fail at disambiguation, like a slapstick comic falling down in front of us, but in fact delivers two meanings that are both possible, though jarringly different. Our response teeters between scorn and admiration depending on how neatly the confusion is contrived and how apt the doubled meanings are. "Poultry in motion" is a groaner because the beta meaning (poultry) adds almost nothing to the concept (graceful chicken) that we already had. It is not only distracting, as puns always are to some degree, but, worse, shows that there was really nothing to be distracted from: we quickly realize that the whole premise was concocted just to make the play possible. Adam Smith (yes, the same one) noted the relevant principle in 1762: “Puns, which are the Lowest Species of Wit, are never witty or agreeable but when there is some contrast betwixt the ideas they excite; a mere quibble is never agreeable.”

Compare the following specimen, funnier, but still fairly high on the cornometer:

A monastery in financial trouble decided to go into the fish-and-chips industry to raise revenues. One night a customer knocked on the door and a monk answered. "Are you the fish friar?" the customer asked. "No," the robed figure replied, "I'm the chip monk." — from The Best Book of Puns by Art Moger

Better, better. The improbable premise is a defect, perhaps; but the two meanings of "fish friar" arrive in the identical syllables more serendipitously yet with less strain than in poetry/poultry; and both are perfectly logical in the absurd context. The riposte then gives us an unexpected bonus, piling a second pun upon the first, in what becomes almost a tour de force — except that the beta meaning of "chip monk" has to be counted a mild disappointment: small, striped rodents have nothing to do with fish, chips, or monasteries.

But when the ambiguity arises without apparent forcing, and both meanings are relevant, the result can be art. Asked what the difference was between men and women, Samuel Johnson replied, "Madam, I can't conceive, can you?" — giving her two perfectly reasonable (though conflicting) answers for the price of one. A bar here in Charleston, Illinois, used to sponsor a yearly event dubbed the Turkey Testicle Festival, featuring grilled delicacies and plenty of beer. Assigned to cover the event for the student newspaper, Christy, much older by then, gave her article an unforgettable headline:

The Turkey Testicle Festival — You'll Have a Ball!

The two meanings differ sharply in kind and import, but both flow naturally from the phrase and fit the context neatly: that seems to be the recipe for the artful pun. But in these last two examples, another element is also clearly at work: the puns are not merely droll, but spicy, for the beta meaning is mildly taboo. A broad definition of the pun might include double entendres and a vast number of dirty jokes, which often feature the last-second substitution of an outlaw meaning for a polite one. What renders dirty jokes basically acceptable may be that the guilty fantasy flits through the mind at the unconscious level before it is officially recognized in the punch-line; the listener feels caught, complicit, because one of his mental searches was barking up just that tree. In such jokes, however, the momentary annihilation of taboo eclipses the merely verbal slapstick that has licensed it, and we cease to think of them as puns at all. The rueful groan is still there somewhere, but drowned in a gale of laughter.

Anything much more risqué than a turkey gonad, thus, will take us beyond the bounds of the pun proper. As for double entendres, though thrilling to discover in your voice mail, they are curiously dull specimens for analysis. The problem is, anything works: say what you like in the requisite tone, and it's a double entendre. ("So, shall I check your gas meter?") Such false puns feign an ambiguity where none really exists, for the low motive of plausible deniability rather than the high one of lexical or grammatical insight.

At another border of the genre, one finds the faint puns and word plays that sit rather quietly in titles and slogans, usually aiming not for laughter but, surprisingly, just the opposite: gravity, or at least suggestiveness. The following are titles of stories or songs:

On Parasites Lost

With a Finger in My I

Female Trouble

Organ Solo: Masturbation Words [in a journal on lexicography]

Waves of Change [in a story on the recent tsunamis in Asia]

And these are advertising slogans:

Subaru: driven by what's inside.

Don't treat your puppy like a dog.

It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.

The best seat in the house. [Jockey Underwear]

See America at see level. [Amtrak]

Something special in the air. [American Airlines]

Right is Right, Left is Wrong [Sign at a political rally]

There are a million and one excuses for not wearing a safety belt. Some are real killers.

The more you think about such instances, the more surprising they seem. How is it that the trope we associate with churlish immaturity could find such favor among those who are trying to convince and impress us? Shouldn't a guy with a serious message (Wear that seatbelt, fool!) try his level best to avoid puns?

A big part of the explanation, I think, is the writer's need to slow us down. Our normal pace for word processing is lickety-split, easily a hundred words per minute in normal conversation, up to four or five times that in easy reading. But if words are to make an impression in themselves, attaining a lapidary grip upon the memory, we must savor them much more slowly. The pun accomplishes this ipso facto, forcing a linguistic double-take and a slow, conscious scrutiny. By the time we have read it at all, we are doomed to remember it, at least for a while. In ads, this advantage seems to counterbalance a great deal of incongruity or irrelevance, especially if the general context is sufficiently witless. Take the Subaru slogan, “Driven by What’s Inside.” The alpha meaning seems to be that the company's employees are all fanatically bent on your customer satisfaction. The beta meaning is "the driver drives it." Such thundering banality ought to be at least as droll as "poultry in motion." Somehow, though, it isn't. The slogan is hilarious if you make fun of it, but by itself it just sits there, blinking owlishly, not getting the joke.

For most titles and slogans, though, the reason for the low groan quotient seems to be that the beta meaning reinforces the alpha meaning rather than undermining it. When separate search parties take sharply different paths yet arrive at the same place, the effect can be not clumsiness but the opposite: grace, mysterious rightness. In the dogfood slogan, for instance, the alpha meaning of "like a dog" (like an adult canine) is completed and underscored by the beta meaning (poorly). To treat your puppy like an adult is to treat it poorly: makes sense. The whole thing feels nifty, pithy, wise. In the seatbelt message and "Waves of Change," the beta meaning confirms the alpha by seizing upon and literalizing an implicit metaphor, turning conceptual waves into real tsunamis, the mock death of a belly laugh into the real thing.

Titles tend to be shorter and less explicit than slogans, waiting to make complete sense till after we have read the story, and often seem to pun more by equivocation than intention. By itself "Female trouble," is no real pun at all, but the mere fact of its being in a title sets us to exploring the tradeoffs between an alpha meaning (anything to do with pap smears) and a much more promising beta one (male trouble with females). In these cases, the authors seem to fall into puns rather than resorting to them. Or the language, one might say, defaults to punhood. But the corniest and most overtly punning title here — that of the nature essay "On Parasites Lost" — shows how the pun can assist compression as well as vice versa. The play on Milton's Paradise Lost allows the author to deliver in two words what amounts to a complete and complex thought: "You may think you are getting rid of unneeded and obnoxious species, but in fact you depend on them in ways you don't understand, and will ultimately find you have destroyed the Nature you love." The cogency of this greatly reduces the groan factor, though no one will fail to grimace initially.

Such examples show that puns are by no means strictly ornamental or extrinsic; some of them are strikingly necessary and functional. In this category belong those ingenious portmanteau terms that swarm into the language each year, sparked by expressive need and conceptual duress, then get kicked back out (mostly) the next. Scandimania: a British vogue for Nordic products. Brexit: the UK’s defiant exodus from the European Union. Cell Fish: a person rudely paying more attention to her cell phone than to her companions. Doppelbanger: a man attracted to women who look just like him. Mansplaining: discoursing with unfounded confidence, simply because you are male and your listener is not. Racne: pimples on a woman’s breasts. Such nifty patches on the language might not always be called puns, but they at least share the broad tendency to frustrate disambiguation, then to exploit rival interpretations, opportunistically jamming diverse meanings into a single verbal space. Often it is syllables rather than whole words that seem to be in play. “Navia” sounds oddly like “mania,” so you work with that; “gang” differs in just one phoneme from “bang,” so there you have it. “Cell” gets to be both a word in itself and the first syllable of “selfish,” and the unwanted extra meaning we normally suppress in the latter word instead gets to swim free.

Ultimately the problem with "pun," as with most terms the English teacher has in her kit-bag of jargon, is knowing how far to stretch it. The term does not give us a positive ID so much as one way of looking at a blackbird. Do we count the grandly polysemous, overdetermined speech of poetry and high-flown oratory? Traditionally we use more honorific terms to deal with this: ambiguity, levels of meaning, symbol. But the greatest of poets, Shakespeare, was also the greatest of punsters, with thousands of plays in his plays; and in proverbs, weighty sayings, gorgeous verse, and mysteriously memorable speeches, a major underlying principle — the happy convergence of different routes to meaning — seems basically the same as in puns. To take an instance at random, the conceit of parturition plays about the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address: "... our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty." Almost no one would call this a pun, but the chief difference seems slight: just that the beta meaning, recasting the Forefathers as birthing mothers, never quite makes it out of the closet.

Or take these famous lines from Yeats:

For Love has pitched his mansion
In the place of excrement
And nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

If it were not so lovely and grave and poised, it would be a standup routine, given the doublings. "Pitched" as in tossed, as in covered with pitch, or as in set up for camping? Well, all three seem to work, though to picture a mansion thrown up as if it were a tent takes a nimble imagination. The odd syntax of the next sentence forces a hesitation between "sole" and "soul," — alone or spiritual, the latter meaning fitting rather better with the unexpected rhyme word, "whole." But that word, too, trails a submerged homonym, one that for at least some readers resonates all too well — and outrageously — with the overall theme: the discomfort of having the most sublime emotions localized in the least appropriate body parts. Of course, this is the kind of analysis that makes sophomores decide that the English teacher is just too weird for them this semester, and they have a point: such meanings work nicely at the edges of consciousness, but become bathetic and wrong if hauled too forcibly to center stage.

So let's end with something simpler, the lyrics of a sad, smarmy, pretty country song:

Hold me like you want to
Instead of like you have to ...
Love me like you used to
When you used to love me

How strange that a lament so heartfelt should revolve around a dry little vocabulary lesson, examining and contrasting two of the many meanings of "love": cherish and have sex with. How strange that this fussy fiddling with words should strengthen the emotion rather than undercutting it. It seems that, whatever else we may be talking about, we are never too busy to talk about language itself, directing keen attention to the how of communication as well as the what. Indeed, against all odds, such preening formalism often seems to speed the message home. If the example of poets means anything, a flashy, improbable coincidence between two or three meanings of the same word merely proves you are sincere, and can win you love and fame rather than hanging, mutilation, drowning, or other grisly fates we passionately wish upon the prose punster.

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