In defense of puns as a form of highbrow humor
By ABHINAYA KASAGANI — akasagani@ucdavis.edu
I promise the reader that the initial conception of this article did not stem from my being relentlessly mocked for my penchant for puns. My sincerest apologies that we all cannot be absolutely hilarious with the way we turn words on their sides and arrange them with care.
Something as trivial as a pun, often dismissed as being a “dad joke” or a type of lowbrow humor, represents a cerebral form of social sport that rewards both parties precisely because of the mental leaps and bounds that they are required to make.
James Geary, author of “Wit’s End,” notes that “puns are all about exchange and they create an intimacy […] you’re in it together, sharing a secret.” In order to make a pun work, both parties must share a set of references, meanings and cultural associations; the construction of a joke is reliant on shared understanding. Puns collapse two ideas into one sound, imploring the listener to consider the simultaneous existence of both possibilities. They are, in this way, democratic by nature — one must agree on what makes the joke funny in order to derive any satisfaction from it.
Geary also notes that “the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.” Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs contained puns with the same persistence as Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible is rife with wordplay that gets represented and misrepresented and even psychiatrist Sigmund Freud appreciated puns because of their capacity to reveal one’s subconscious. President Abraham Lincoln reportedly once received a letter from a priest “asking him to suspend the sentence of a man to be hanged the next day,” to which his response was, “if I don’t suspend it tonight, the man will surely be suspended tomorrow.”
While other forms of humor, in these fraught and tense times, do have their benefits, our current social and political climate calls for the re-evaluation of what we, as a collective, deem funny. While most humor can be weaponized, puns eliminate all attempts to one-up another; you must bring yourself down to the level of the other in order to get the joke. Puns are playful without being divisive and are thus able to much more quickly diffuse any tension they may create.
Apart from democratizing society, puns reward quick thinkers — those thinking on their feet. When one resorts to making puns, they are manipulating the rules of language as we know them, demonstrating their understanding of phonetics, semantics and irony. Words can mean anything: Language is often fickle and malleable. Occasionally, puns serve as cultural tools that reward intelligence, bridging these existing gaps between cultures and languages. Language becomes gamified, reminding one of their ability to conquer the written and spoken word.
This is not to say that all puns are well-reasoned. I am, admittedly, guilty of making puns that warrant the loudest of groans. Maybe the answer is as simple as puns are fun; maybe the long punchline that you’ve been waiting in for hours wasn’t packed with any punch. Puns will, until the end of time, elicit a groan from their audience; this only means they are doing their job. Speaking as a pundit of sorts, I would claim that to laugh at a pun is to participate in a fleeting moment of collective comprehension where any and all are welcome.
Written by: Abhinaya Kasagani— akasagani@ucdavis.edu
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