Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  Dedication

  For Gabi, without whom my life would have less meaning than a bad pun.

  Epigraph

  “Some people have a way with words, and other people . . . oh, uh, not have way.”

  —Steve Martin

  “Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.”

  —Victor Hugo

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Warm-Up A Brief Glossary of Puns

  Introduction

  First Round 1: If There’s a Pun in the First Act

  2: Welcome to the Punderdome

  3: The Place Beyond the Puns

  4: Spitting the Lotto Ticket

  Second Round 5: The Punning Linguists

  6: Games and Shows

  7: All the Puns That Are Fit to Print

  Semifinals 8: @ the Joke of Midnight

  9: The Cauliflower’s Cumin from Inside the House

  10: The Graffiti Castle

  Finals 11: Mutually Assured Pun Destruction

  12: Punniest of Show

  13: Punslingers

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Warm-Up

  A Brief Glossary of Puns

  Language has no patience. Yesterday’s That’s So Raven will become tomorrow’s Raven AF, whether we’re prepared for it or not. Although this evolution tends to happen gradually over time, some people don’t have that kind of time. These brave pioneers make up their own words, either to communicate new ideas or to keep from being boring. Way more of these new words are actually puns than most people would care to admit.

  The word pun is a blanket term, though, spanning across all different flavors of wordplay. Here’s a brief glossary of the kinds you’ll be seeing in this book.

  Homophonic pun: words that sound the same but have different meanings (“Walking in light rain is a mist opportunity”)

  Homographic pun: words that are spelled the same but sound different (“Of the two types of anesthesia on offer, I’d prefer the number won”)

  Homonymic pun: words that are spelled and sound the same (“I felt unsettled inside so I had an evening out”)

  Portmanteau: words that combine two other words in either sound or meaning (Lossary, as in a glossary that is kind of a waste of time)

  Introduction

  People are screaming. Throaty howls, guttural bellows, and those whoo’s where the first two letters drop off like rocket boosters so the rest of the word can soar. I’m screaming, too. On either side of me are people I could swear I’ve seen on the street holding clipboards, encouraging me to switch to green renewable energy. Ordinarily, I’d cross a busy intersection to avoid those people, but right now we’re on the same team, and our combined energy is making the floor thrum beneath our feet. For some reason, the couple just ahead can only muster a paltry golf clap, but they’re a lonely minority, within the greater lonely minority of people who would come to an event like this.

  The man standing on the lip of the stage at the Highline Ballroom in New York City looks like a magician. His hair is a wavy brown head-cape, his face is gaunt but telegenic, and he’s tall enough to dangle things just out of most people’s reach. Every time he says something—alakazam!—the room explodes.

  There is nothing I’ve ever been surer of than the fact that this is, hands down, the best reaction to a pun I’ve ever seen—and I’ve been to Jewish summer camp in Florida. Twice.

  Applauding because someone made a pun seems like a paradox. Every lesson the world has taught me about comedy, irony, and how adults behave in public suggests that this should not be happening, that we’re perhaps laughdrunk from some airborne elixir or that the delicate fabric of civilization is unraveling. But it’s not.

  Instead, the five hundred people in the crowd get their wish: Jargon Slayer advances to the next round of Punderdome.

  Imagine the biggest You Had to Be There moment that has ever happened. The sky cracks open and a fleet of aliens touches down to teach Earthlings how to move solid matter with their minds. It’s awesome. However, you are seriously under the weather that day and can’t leave the house. Also, the aliens unlock everyone’s mind powers only for one day, and only on condition that they—the aliens—not be captured on video. Never again are they seen or heard from, and telekinesis resumes not being a thing. It’s hard for some people to accept that it even happened. But it did. You just had to be there.

  Well, reader, I was there. Not with aliens, of course, but I have experienced something equally implausible. I spent a year attending, participating in, and documenting pun competitions, along with other activities that secretly resemble pun competitions. In that time, I received and recited more puns than even the most ardent Gene Shalit admirer would be able to endure. The book you are about to read presents these puns as they happened, and I must stress right up front that the reactions to them are not embellished.

  You are going to read some puns that sound just tremendously unfunny, puns that don’t make sense, puns that will get your blood boiling. This book is going to be heaved across somebody’s living room, borne on a flight of rage, and it’s going to scuff a banister. The important thing to know, though, is that when these puns were performed, they got the exact-size laughs and cheers described here. It strains credibility. The words cognitive dissonance will seem exceedingly applicable the more you read. It’s going to seem as dubious as those nights in college when you left a standard issue party early and everyone told you the next day how legendary a rager it became the minute you left. But it really happened. Every gnarled, misshapen, double-meaning word is true.

  You just had to be there.

  First Round

  1

  If There’s a Pun in the First Act

  When I was seventeen, Jill O’Doyle asked if I’d seen Titanic yet. It was the beginning of third-period calculus, the movie had just opened, and I had some opinions about its star.

  “Titanic?” I said, my lips curling into the fat-kid equivalent of a Billy Idol snarl. “You mean with Leonardo DiCraprio?”

  Jill looked about a thousand detentions exhausted by this response, but to her credit, she ignored what I’d said and became suddenly fascinated by the contents of her Trapper Keeper. Our chat was over. Two weeks later, I saw Titanic and I cried.

  As far as I can remember, this was my introduction to how puns generally go over out in the world.

  Back at home, though, things were different. My dad had always been fond of pejorative twists on celebrity names. He would say “John Revolta” a lot, especially in the latter years of the Look Who’s Talking franchise, but no famous person was safe. Politicians, basketball players, lead singers of bands I’d never heard of—they were all fair game. So I had come by the instinct honestly. I would leave it honestly, too.

  The Leonardo DiCraprio incident was more of a failure to read the room than an indictment of puns. It was still typical, though, of what happens when a lazy wordburp rips through casual conversation. There just isn’t all that much you can say to a pun—even when it’s not arbitrarily bashing the dreamiest movie star on the planet. The best reactions I got in the years to come were nods, groans, and other minor acknowledgments that wordplay had just occurred. More often what I’d get were bone-chilling silences, third-degree stink eye, and heavy Twitter unfollowings. So I caved in and absorbed what I thought was the conventional wisdom: that puns are comedy kryptonite.

  Until I set foot in my first pun competition, I had no idea just how many people disregard the conventional wisdom. In Brooklyn alone, it’s at least four hundred a month.

 
; Punderdome began as an ephemeral whim in the spring of 2011, when a spritely spark plug named Jo Firestone heard about one of the weirder annual traditions of Austin, Texas: the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. She was shocked and delighted to find out such a thing existed. Although not much of a punster herself, the rising comedian wanted to see what kind of puns Brooklyn would generate, if given not just an excuse or permission but a mandate to make them in front of an audience. Without looking any further into the O. Henry than its central premise, she booked a venue in Park Slope to stage her own version.

  Considering that punning is widely thought of as the essence of the dad joke—narrowly edging out the “I’m hungry”/“Hi, hungry, I’m Dad” construction by a nose hair—it’s almost poetic that Punderdome was cofounded by a comedian’s dad. Fred Firestone is a retired attorney turned consultant, known for busting out frequent passable impressions of Rodney Dangerfield. When he got the call from Jo, asking for his thoughts on what a pun competition should entail, Fred offered so many suggestions that Jo ended up asking if he might want to just fly in from St. Louis to be her cohost. He said he needed more time to think about it. Then he called back ten minutes later, having already booked a plane ticket.

  Around thirty of Jo’s friends showed up to the first-ever Punderdome, along with some random bar hoppers she managed to pull in off the street. It was a long, gleefully disorganized night, a gloppy hellbroth of infinite gibberish. Eventually, a woman named Atilla the Pun won with a rhyming couplet about Disney Movies that culminated in One Hundred and Pun Dalmatians. It wasn’t exactly an Ali-Frazier knockout punch. The crowd left happy enough, though, to ensure that Jo would invite them back the following month.

  Over the course of sixty shows and counting, Punderdome has since evolved into a pop culture powerhouse. It’s spawned two TV pilots and a licensed card game. GQ magazine called it one of the Funniest Nights in America in 2015. It’s also developed a thriving community of champions who have dedicated fans and—believe it or not—groupies. If you live in New York and happen to make a pun in front of three or more people, one of them will ask if you’ve ever been to Punderdome.

  The show’s popularity is at least partly due to its prescient tapping of an underserved market. Punderdome, like the O. Henry before it, creates a right place and right time for something a lot of people feel they’re not supposed to like and ought not to do. It’s a bathhouse for closeted punsters, safe haven for that person in every office and classroom turning blue in the face from suppressing wordplay all day.

  But that person definitely wasn’t me. I was doing just fine, thank you, in terms of pun intake and distribution. When I first heard about pun competitions, there was no ministerial calling from either deep within or high above. I had no ambitions of devoting my life to coming up with words that sound like other words while in front of a crowd. In fact, at the time, I could barely think in front of a crowd at all.

  One day in June of 2015, I got an irresistible invitation. The organizers of Just for Laughs, the world’s largest comedy festival, asked me to come to Montreal and moderate a panel with the creators and cast of HBO’s Silicon Valley. It was a chance to share a stage with Mike Judge, the man behind Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, alongside a crew of comedians who were shaping up to be all-timers. Just days before, they had stuck the landing on an already-great sophomore season with a killer mic drop of a finale. Now, for their efforts, everyone involved would have to discuss the show with me in a hotel ballroom in Canada.

  I accepted the offer immediately and began Yelping Montreal restaurants in search of vegetarian poutine.

  As the festival drew near, though, my excitement curdled into concentrated fear-sweat. What if I froze up? What if I melted down? What if I blanked out and became a stammery, tongue-tied cumulus cloud of discomfort? My solution was overpreparation. Curate a stockpile of questions. Put them in an order that makes sense. Debate every detail, including whether to ask the audience to “give it up” for the panel, even though I’d always thought it was a weird thing to say.

  By the morning of the event, fear-sweat had given way to terror-barf. I was second-guessing every question and also every piece of my wardrobe. (Fitted blue button-down, black blazer, gray Levi’s. Wait! The blazer is too warm. It has to go!) Backstage was a Last Supper tableau of comedic celebrity minutia. Zach Woods and Martin Starr were being interviewed in tandem; Mike Judge hovered near a craft services table heavy on melon and brie; T.J. Miller and Thomas Middleditch were hunched over their phones, synchronized tweeting. I said hi to everybody, complimenting them on their performances in a live read of The Big Lebowski the previous night. Then I made a beeline for the bathroom to hide in sweet solitude.

  One of the last things I’d prepared was a joke to jump-start the panel. The main characters on the show were all gawky computer geniuses, save for Erlich Bachman, who was cocky as hell and never stopped talking. The guy who played him, T.J. Miller, was a swaggering comedian and movie star, a thermonuclear thunderclap of verbosity. The contrast between him and some of the more reserved members of the panel seemed worth noting.

  My opening gambit: “All right, look at this murderers’ row up here. It’s like the Avengers of soft-spoken comedy . . . and also T.J. Miller.”

  The thousand or so people in the crowd laughed. My joke worked! I chuckled into the microphone, giddy with relief, ready to dive into the first question. And that’s when it started.

  “You don’t want . . . to do that, man,” T.J. said. “I’ll hit you back so hard, you’ll look less like a substitute teacher than ever.”

  Shit. He was right. Not only about the devastating but accurate way he’d assessed my look, but also how ill-equipped I was to get into a burn contest with T.J. Miller. Chalk it up to inexperience or sheer stupidity, but somehow, when I’d thought of that joke, it never entered my mind that calling out a motormouthed comedian for being just that, while onstage in front of hundreds of his fans, after he’d been warming up for days at the world’s largest comedy festival—it hadn’t dawned on me there might be any blowback from doing that. When I’d mapped out the panel like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, it went: “witty opening joke,” pause for applause, and dive into first question with three potential subquestions ready. I’d pre-bonsai’d the decision tree. It was an epic miscalculation, though. Everyone on the panel and in the audience was now cracking up at T.J. for roasting me. And the floodgates were wide open.

  “I had that coming,” I admitted, trying to move on.

  People on the show are constantly telling the main characters cautionary tales about working in Silicon Valley, so I asked the panel if anyone had a similar experience getting started in comedy.

  T.J. Miller recited a piece of advice his costar Martin Starr once gave him. He made it a point to mention that Martin would have said it in more of a monotone, though. “Whereas I’m the loud one, Joe!” he yelled and started cackling like a supervillain. Then he looked me up and down and shook his head. “A blue button-down and no tie.”

  I knew I should have kept the blazer on. No way it would’ve made me sweat more than I was sweating now.

  “You kinda almost dressed up to moderate,” T.J. added.

  I closed my eyes, forced a smile, and nodded, perfectly helpless in a mess of my own making. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t even get in the game. T.J. was wearing an outfit that was objectively ludicrous—a camo jacket over a T-shirt with an anime wrestler’s face covering the entire torso, and a teal polo collar poking out from beneath—and I had nothing to say because surely it could get even worse than this.

  At one point, I steered into the skid to address T.J. directly. I’d read that every actor onstage had tried out for his role, so I asked why he’d ultimately been the right one for it. T.J. recited a long list of traits he shared with his counterpart, Erlich, one of which was a propensity for smoking pot all the time.

  “I was so high when I came out here,” he said, “I thought k.d. lang was
moderating.”

  The audience went into hysterics as I reassessed my haircut, collar pointiness, and whatever else about me suggested the singer/songwriter behind “Constant Craving.” If there was a funny or even just slightly face-saving way to respond, I couldn’t find it. I’d lost my oral compass.

  “I have no comeback for that,” I said. It went without saying.

  It wasn’t just that I looked like if k.d. lang was a substitute teacher, which indeed I did, it felt like I’d become that. As the panel went further off the rails—and produced a running joke about me being in ISIS—I tried in vain to rein it in.

  “Your segues are the best part of this panel,” T.J. said after I tried to bring the topic back to his TV show.

  It wasn’t just him, though; by now, everyone was pitching in. I had fed a squad of world-class improvisers a big juicy prompt—that the moderator was fair game—and they ran wild with it. When I asked Mike Judge about what to expect in the third season of Silicon Valley, he simply said, “ISIS.”

  “You have an impossible job,” Thomas Middleditch noted.

  Mercifully, a P.A. signaled me with a cutoff motion and I said, “I’m getting word that ISIS is going to chop my head off if we don’t stop.”

  Then I implored the audience to give it up for the panel.

  Although the organizers of Just for Laughs assured me the event had been among the best of the festival, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The whole thing had devolved into a competition to say the funniest thing about a category—and instead of being in on it, I was the category.

  I went to Punderdome for the first time, a few months after the Silicon Valley incident, for the same reason I go to most inconvenient comedy events: a begrudging sense of obligation. My friend Tim Donnelly, a features writer for the New York Post at the time, invited me to watch him compete. I responded with the same question everybody would later ask me when I mentioned pun competitions: “What’s a pun competition?”