It’s time to face up the fact that you have been hearing, reading, and, almost certainly, telling puns from a young age.
When you were a child, you chanted songs like:
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very fuzzy, was he?
and:
A sailor went to C-C-C
To see what he could C-C-C.
But all that he could C-C-C
Was the bottom of a great blue C-C-C.
As you aged, you started to appreciate riddles, such as:
What happens when you drop your waffle on the beach? You end up with a sandy Eggo.
Do you know why cellphones no longer work in San Diego? Because we’ve lost our Chargers.
What happens when the smog lifts off Los Angeles? UCLA.
As an inveterate (not invertebrate) pun gent, I believe the pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are much more likely to run into a pun than into a sword. No one is sure of the origin of the word pun, but the best guess is that pun is a shortening of the Italian puntiglio, “a small or fine point.” Punnery is largely the trick of compacting two or more ideas within a single word or expression. Punnery challenges us to apply the greatest pressure per square syllable of language.
Getting off my high horse, here’s one of my extended puns — straight from the horse’s mouth.
Once a pony time, there lived in Philly-delphia a coltish, stag-geringly beautiful lass named Whinny, who wore a ponytail and horsed around with her family and friends. She often said, “Neigh!” and bridled and kicked up her heels at authority. But I’ve also herd that she was a real workhorse who each day champed at the bit to get back in harness.
Whinny was nobody’s foal. She was a stable girl who always mane-tained her equine-imity and never had a nightmare. She hoped to grow up to be a dark-horse political candidate who would become a frontrunner in the Gallop Pole. And she never beat a dead horse nor looked a gift one in the mouth.
Now, just for the halibut, here’s a whale of a tail I’ve created. I hope you won’t feel that you’ve “haddock up to here” but that you’ll enjoy it hook, line, and sinker. Please let minnow.
Is life under the sea like a dogfish-eat-dogfish world with everyone separated into their own special groupers, each one anemone to the other, or are all underwater creatures united for a common porpoise?
There was once a brilliant sturgeon who was a flounder of and doctor in a community health fishility. Wiser than Salmon and a good sole, he always whistled a happy tuna.
But sadly one day, one of his patients, a crabby, shell fish whipper snapper, clammed that the sturgeon’s treatments had made him terribly eel and filed a malpractice suit demanding his oyster.
This put the sturgeon in an honest-to-cod pickerel, and he feared that he could end up under lox and key, But the judge declared that the case was so fishy, so full of carp, and smelt so to high to heaven that, at the herring, she o-fish-ally pronounced, “Not gill-ty!” As a result, the defeated acc started hitting the bottlenose hard and wound up on Squid Row.
If you’ve managed to survive that my horsing around with puns and my fish story, I now invite you pun pals to enter my Pun-Off contest with your best original puns.
Please drop me a line at [email protected] (don’t forget to include the h in the middle). No more than three submissions per contestant, and please keep them fairly short. I must receive your preys on words by April 15. Please, please include the San Diego community where you live.
I’ll publish the best of your punderful submissions in my April 29 column. Two winners will receive a signed and inscribed copy of my book The Ants Are My Friends.
***
Looking ahead, I’ll be performing “Living Will: The Legacy of William Shakespeare” on Friday, April 21, starting at 7 p.m. at the Oceanside Theatre and Sunday, April 23, and Monday, April 24, at Lamplighters Theatre in La Mesa, each starting at 7 p.m. More details in my next column.
Please send your questions and comments about language to [email protected] website: www.verbivore.com.
