Puzzled

by David Astle

  Knock-knock jokes are toc-tocs in the Transvaal, klop-klops in Amsterdam and kon-kons in Kyoto. The stuff of cute graffiti, headlines, slogans and kids’ jokes: puns separate us from the beasts.

  Virgil cracked them. Homer and Dante lapped them up. Don Quixote is built on wordplay and swordplay. In Act II of Macbeth a boozy porter does a knock-knock routine: the gag reflex is certainly an enduring one.

  To a child, puns present the elements of risk and creativity, testing both semantic and social boundaries. (Though remember, no matter how far you push the envelope, it will always remain stationery.) Compared to the bigotry of so much adult humour, puns imply a wonder of how language operates. Instead of racism or sexism, the punster would rather describe two silkworms racing down a leaf, only to end up in a tie.

  Puns fall into three main baskets. The first includes our silkworms or the talkative yak – a wisecrack based on double meaning. Like the coffee shops that trade as Ground Zero or Daily Grind.

  The second sort mucks about with homophones, like pirate earrings costing a buccaneer. Or subeditors forging such headlines as:

  EMERGING OLYMPIANS COME FOURTH

  CIRCUS FIRE: HEAT IN TENTS

  HAVANA BALL

  Lastly, there’s the manipulation kind where words or names have been reshaped. A sick pig, say, needs oinkment, and the sick bird, tweetment. Or take a gander at these takeaway joints:

  Just Falafs

  Kebabylon

  Marquis de Salade

  Vaudeville veteran Les Dawson reckoned that puns were the quickest way to lose an audience, while John Cleese, another star in the English galaxy, is attributed as saying that comedy has three rules:

  no puns;

  no puns;

  and no puns.

  Clinicians at the Levity Institute recognise this syndrome as ‘punnus envy’, an affliction common among groan-ups, yet not crossword lovers. We can’t resist a wry game of gotcha. In fact the pun warrants its own recipe. Two chapters in fact. Brace yourself.

  GROAN-UP HUMOUR – cute clues and misdirection

  Americans call them cute clues, where a standard definition is dumped in favour of a comical slant, a more oblique tangent to the answer. Ben Tausig, a Gen-Xer who syndicates his puzzles widely in the States, has a flair for this clueing mode. Take these four, for example:

  Proverbial battlers = SEXES

  Apple for the teacher? = IMAC

  Country album = ATLAS

  Go home = JAPAN

  Each has the potential to be styled into a riddle, so elegant is the wordplay. (If the last clue bamboozles you, think about Go, the Japanese board game.) Better still, this cute mode of clueing can rejuvenate a weary solution, like ATLAS, which tends to recur at short intervals. You’ll also notice, in Tausig’s quartet, that only one entails question marks. This rightly suggests that seasoned US solvers don’t insist on punctuation to declare the mental twist.

  Though when the twist is kinkier than usual, like these next four from a bevy of American setters, the question mark is mandatory:

  Something gays and straights have in common? = LONG A

  Drive in the backseat of a car? = LIBIDO

  Holiday cut short? = XMAS

  Star of Westerns? = BADGE

  By definition, not all of these can be described as pure-bred puns, yet they certainly throw fresh light on their answers in the same way that riddles do. As we know, riddles pivot on a skewed way of thinking, often a misdirection – another reason why most US bloggers plump for the tag of cute clue, or daffy definition, rather than the stricture of pun.

  In cryptics, the label can be called the oblique definition, or a tee-hee, even a riddle clue, with a pun often residing at the centre. Unlike makers of US quicks, the cryptic setter will almost always enlist the question mark, as these three from Rufus in the Guardian illustrate:

  A young crab? = NIPPER

  Well off? = SOUND ASLEEP

  Hold hands? = STEVEDORES

  Pun clues are indeed nippers. Their surface sense encourages you to look one way while the answer stalks you from behind and – ouch.

  Of all puzzle setters, Rufus (Roger Squires) is born to this clue style, as he once graced the stage and TV screen as a magician. He therefore knows the art of misdirection, getting the crowd to glance left while he dabbles with mechanics on the right. As a member of the elite Magic Circle, Rufus is also accomplished in patter, that other silken quality of good puns, lulling you with words you take to be innocuous, only to learn they pack a punch.

  Notice too how the Rufus trio boasts brevity. As a whole, puns tend to be shorter clues since the formula doesn’t demand the two customary strands, as wordplay and definition are woven into one allusion. First-class student (a Rufus clue for INFANT) is entrusting the quip to bear both elements.

  That said, length is not always the giveaway. Some prolong the gag, or take their full measure, as this Times bundle goes to prove:

  Digitally produced image = FINGER PAINTING

  Materially unaffected by psychotherapy? = SHRINK RESISTANT

  Hail fellow? Well, Met = WEATHER BUREAU

  Maybe it’s what you feared – one pun clue without a question mark, while another holds one in its centre. But the etiquette is usually reliable, even if the clue length can fluctuate.

  Take our Master clue, for instance. Hardly skimpy, compared to the cunning of Rufus, the five-word specimen at least sports a question mark. Let’s take a look:

  Swinger’s bar for partner pickups? (7)

  Where are your thoughts? Shadowy liaisons? Kiss-and-no-tell? That’s the plan, of course: the wrong direction. You won’t be shocked to hear the clue has nothing to do with sexual antics, despite the surface sense. Indeed the answer is more aligned to an earlier headline, the one about the circus fire.

  Change the kinky backdrop for the Big Top, and all the key words – swinger, bar, partner – take on a new glow. If partners are being picked up, it’s not over sleazy one-liners, but different lines suspended from the upper reaches of the ring. TRAPEZE of course is the answer you’re chasing, and one step closer to sealing the grid’s second quadrant. Handily, the Master Puzzle’s other pun clue is 30-Across, along the frame, but before we go there let’s take a break from the circus and throw the spotlight on a lesser known aspect of the puzzle story – the romance of partner pickups.

  DOWN WITH LOVE – hidden proposals

  Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon are lifelong partners and makers of some of the best cryptics in the world. This Pennsylvania pair have been creating deviant grids for the Atlantic Monthly until recently, as well as a weekly cryptic in Canada’s National Post. At the time of writing, their work runs monthly in the Wall Street Journal. For some strange reason, US (or Canadian) cryptics are reluctant to succumb to pun clues, opting for every other recipe, including some of these exquisite anagram clues from the Cox and Rathvon stable:

  Les, Tom, Dicky and Harry = MOLEST

  For Callas, a fabulous place to sing = LA SCALA

  When not crafting clues, the couple collect fossils from the Devonian period, listen to calypso music and play cupid for their solvers. Once anyway, back in September 2007.

  The story began with an email from a young communications officer named Aric Egmont from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wished to propose to his girlfriend Jennie Bass, a medical student. Every Sunday Aric and Jennie loved to collaborate over the quick in the Boston Globe, a feature created by Cox and Rathvon. Any chance, asked Aric, of lacing a proposal into the crossword? Romantics at heart, Cox and Rathvon warmed to the idea.

  Popping the Question, the eventual puzzle, wove half a dozen nuptial phrases into the grid, from LET’S TIE THE KNOT to MAY I HAVE YOUR HAND. These longer entries crossed covert references to Jennie’s family, friends and other passions. The last themed answer was clued as Generic proposal (a pun of Jen + Aric), being Aric’s cue to kneel with ring poised and ask WILL YOU MARRY ME.

  ‘She screamed and hugged me,’ Aric recalled in
a follow-up article on the coup. ‘It took her a minute to say yes.’

  I once hatched a similar plot, creating a secretive toast for the wedding of Naomi Taylor, one of the many Taylors to oversee Fairfax puzzles. On Naomi’s big day, my puzzle revolved around something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and the reception at the reception was apparently rapturous.

  Lee Glickstein of California, a sporadic setter for the New York Times, also turned to puzzles to do his bidding. His plan was to tie the knot with his partner, but just in case she had other plans, Lee turned his byline into Ken Stegicelli, masking his true identity on the page. The puzzle hinged on the all-important question, to which thankfully his beloved said yes, causing Ken to revert to a jubilant Lee and go book a chapel.

  Our last star-crossed story has a bittersweet ending and involves the giant of Australian crosswords, Lindsey Browne. In his salad days, just after the war, LB fell in love with Nancy Moore, aptly a mixture of YON ROMANCE. In cryptic fashion, LB confessed his feelings with an inbuilt acrostic, the first letters of every Across answer spelling I LOVE NANCY MOORE. A few weeks later, once his paramour had twigged to the secret message, Lindsey crafted a sequel: WILL SHE MARRY ME? Not long after that, brimming with the news, LB let his sharper-eyed solvers know the outcome: THE ANSWER IS YES.

  The Herald was less than thrilled, quashing any future updates in Lindsey’s work. These were puzzles after all, not journal entries. Hitched and happy, the couple had four kids, only for cancer to strike Nancy down in 1959. The diagnosis was a brain tumour, compelling LB to sink his meagre puzzle income into a flight to Sweden, hoping the world’s best surgeon at the time could work a miracle. Alas, Nancy lost her battle, leaving Lindsey with four small children, and next to broke.

  The cure? More journalism. More cryptics. And a TV quiz called Pick-A-Box, where the cruciverbalist did a lot better than my damp squib and scooped the prize pool. Invited back by public demand, LB later appeared on a family edition with his second eldest, Adam, and won a further jackpot. Owing to countless hours of researching clues, Lindsey had the perfect mind for trivia. In a tumultuous span of years, crosswords had given him a soulmate, and later the where-withal to manage in her absence.

  Little by little LB recovered from the grief and climbed out of poverty. Then one day he went to a tennis event in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. There, a young social worker named Elspeth Knox, a lover of crosswords and almost starstruck, asked this handsome man on the baseline, ‘Are you LB?’

  ‘C’est moi,’ he said.

  Despite such pompous beginnings, Elspeth saw past Lin’s airs and found a real sweetness, as well as a devoted father. ‘A male chauvinist he may have been,’ laughs Elspeth now, ‘but he never swore. He told me that swearing demonstrated a lack of imagination or an ignorance of the great richness that is the English language.’

  Elspeth agreed, and the two became fast friends. For only the second time in his life, LB was smitten, and a crossword, of course, seemed the traditional way to ask for the young woman’s hand – this time keeping the powers that be in the dark. The response? ELSPETH SAID YES.

  RECIPE PRECIS: PUNS

  A pun is like a comical query, testing a word’s nuances, and hence often flagged by a question mark. The other signature is brevity, since wordplay and definition are entwined. One more tip: look for words that carry several meanings (shutter, for example, can be a louvre, or part of a camera, or maybe a door) and see where each tangent leads.

  QUIZLING 23.1

  Mix the ten letters missing from the riddle below to make its punny two-word answer:

  WH## BO#K DO YO# BUY # #AU#Y GRA##A#IAN?

  QUIZLING 23.2

  A famous English actor. Turn the last letter of his first name into a Roman numeral, and you spell a type of pain that bad puns can produce. Now turn the first letter of his surname into another Roman numeral, and you get a word for glee. Who is our man?

  QUIZLING 23.3

  What eight-letter word means potentially difficult, as well as provoking amusement? And what other word – a three-letter synonym of problem – also means to remedy a problem?

  CHAPTER 24

  … Twister for openers? (8)

  Scrabble was my first true love. You could almost say I was singular about it. The passion began in my early teens, lasting the length of high school. Mates would be roaming the real world meeting girls or forming garage bands while I’d be setting up the Scrabble board, seeing if my right hand could outscore my left. For general studies in Year 12 each student gave a talk about a personal interest. I chose Scrabble, or Scrabble chose me, and I stood there like a loon on day release, reciting the fifty-nine words you can make with RETINA plus a blank.

  CANTIER

  CERTAIN

  CRINATE

  NACRITE

  The class feared I was speaking in tongues, and who could blame them? ANESTRI, RESIANT: half the words were hokum, even to me. But if STARNIE or STEARIN promised 70 points, plus the bingo bonus of 50, then that’s all that mattered. Language in my teens amounted to racking up points.

  I entered tournaments, meeting other verbal misfits in community rooms around Sydney, carrying tiles like holy sacraments. Between games I swotted three-letter words ending in AE and devised ways to dump surplus vowels. I became close friends with DZO (a Tibetan yak) and XU (a former coin of Vietnam). I played cab drivers and professors, retirees and prodigies, creating dense knots of words that looked like pretzels written in Klingon.

  At twenty I made the state’s top echelon, though I had a nemesis, a bloke called John Holgate. With square glasses, wispy beard and a riotous vocab, John was everybody’s nemesis. The Australian champ ran the medical library in Paddington Women’s Hospital, though I’m sure his primary occupation was digesting words ending in J.

  We met a couple of times in his hospital lair to fashion a new board game. Words of course were central to our plan. The board’s shape resembled an eye, with each player needing to complete a circuit before entering the retina for the last challenge. Knower’s Arc was a working title, and it never went anywhere. Though I did. Overseas. With a football team. And for most of my twenties, I hardly drew a blank in anger.

  The reason was GAE, the Scottish verb for go. Or WAE, their word for woe, or with, or a Spenserian wave. Either/or, I was sick of knowing words purely in order to get a score. AGE and AWE were words I could abide, but GAE and WAE belonged with DODO and MOA.

  When I did eventually return to the game, it was strictly a pastime between friends. Scoring was done on the backs of envelopes, and wine was essential. A long lyrical word like COYOTES was preferred to OOCYTES, which seemed too desperate anyhow. Aesthetics, in a way, counted more than mathematics.

  John Holgate kept in touch, usually disguised as John Le Gotha, sending letters to the Herald to comment on Wordwit puzzles, and Ted Validas replied warmly. Puzzles of course couldn’t afford to have answers like NACRITE or CRINATE, which saw the slow erosion of my obscure jargon. My Scrabble links fizzled as well, and soon Mr Le Gotha stopped corresponding altogether. In fact we didn’t see each other for two decades, when an extraordinary coincidence threw us together in 2008.

  The occasion involved eight bodies stuffed into barrels. The barrels occupied an obsolete bank vault in a small corner of South Australia called Snowtown, the end point of a notorious serial killing back in 1999. I’d written a short play about the case – After the Avalanche – and flew to Sydney for an open reading of the script.

  Other plays, other crimes, were involved on the day. The reading was run by a theatre company who had invited submissions for scripts about an Australian crime. I’d chosen Snowtown, while other writers tried their luck with Ned Kelly, the missing Beaumont kids, a stolen bike outside Safe-ways or the disappearance of publisher Juanita Nielsen.

  For readers unfamiliar with the last case, the nutshell version is that Nielsen, a fierce opponent of corrupt land deals in urban Sydney, had vanished in 1975, presumed mu
rdered. By sheer chance the script readings were being held in the Cross, the same postcode where Nielsen was last seen, though the eeriness didn’t end there.

  The moment I entered the building I heard the siren song – the coin-like clatter of Scrabble tiles as they spilt from board to bag. Climbing the stairs, I walked into the past. The prim rows of tables with racks and boards: a Scrabble tournament was in full swing, the Trans-Tasman Challenge no less. A sturdy bloke of 50, dressed in black tracksuit with a kiwi embroidered over his heart, said, ‘Yer right, are ya?’

  ‘I used to play this game,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well–’ His way of saying bugger off. Then I recognised the grizzled features of Holgate in the throng.

  ‘That’s John,’ I said. ‘We know each other.’

  ‘He’s playing,’ said the bouncer, softly.

  Time to go, I thought. ‘I’ll drop back later.’

  The script readings were down the hall in a room of beige carpet and plastic chairs. Late November, the day was hot, and by the time the fourth play was going, the room was stuffy.

  Night and Day at the Carousel Cabaret focused on the murder of Juanita Nielsen. Actors Anonymous, the group in charge, had cast a doppelganger of the missing editor. She stood in the make-believe nightclub, script in hand, rebuking the mobsters in the cocktail booth when her body started swaying. She staggered, clutching her chest as if she were shot, then slumped to the floor. People leapt to her aid. ‘Does anyone know CPR?’ bellowed a director.

  Better than that, I knew a network of smart people in the next room. I bolted down the hall and burst into the tournament, blurting, ‘Is there a doctor here?’

  No, but there was Glenda, a Kiwi nurse. The only hitch, she was halfway through a game. In her eyes I could sense the addict’s dilemma: do I save a life or make a killing with my blank? Her Aussie rival deemed a life to be more important and froze the clock, encouraging Glenda to go.

  John Holgate came too – he knew a bit about medicine, mainly of the gynaecological kind, as well as a lot of arcane anatomical terms like AXILLA and NUCHAL, though less where these parts were located. As Glenda helped bring Juanita Nielsen back to life, John and I chatted.