“Well,” Tim said between bites of báhn mì. “A bunch of us go onstage, we’re given a topic, and then we see who can come up with the best puns on it in ninety seconds.”
“What kind of puns?” I asked. Tim gave me a look of slight exasperation that I would come to know very well. It’s the same face comedians make when they’re introduced by occupation at a party and someone asks them to tell a joke.
“Like, um,” he said, looking up at the ceiling for a second before meeting my eyes again and hoisting his sandwich. “I hope they don’t báhn mì from the pun competition for not thinking of a better pun right now.”
Fair enough. The whole thing sounded suspiciously like spoken-word fight club, but I agreed to go root Tim on. I wanted to know how any pun could be empirically better than any other pun, and who aside from the beloved science teacher at my junior high who screened Spaceballs twice in one school year could possibly thrive at it. My interest spiked, though, when Tim urged me to buy a ticket soon, as the show would definitely sell out. To whom?
That night’s Punderdome was a special one, nine months in the making. Some of the regular champions were facing off against New York Post editors, the people responsible for headlines such as cloak and shag her (General Petraeus sex scandal) and obama beats weiner (Congressman Weiner sex scandal, or one of them anyway). Pun headlines are these editors’ bread and butter, but it usually takes more than a few seconds to conjure and polish them into gems. Tonight, that luxury would not exist.
When I arrive at the Highline Ballroom, where I vaguely remember once seeing Gnarls Barkley, the typical bouncer pat-down feels unnecessary. The only contraband I imagine getting smuggled in are sharply waxed mustache points and extremely hot takes on the last season of Game of Thrones.
Inside, dozens of radically pale New Yorkers are sprawled out in each direction. Every other face has glasses perched on its nose and is talking animatedly over one of those upbeat songs by The Cure. I don’t know where to stand without being in somebody’s way, so I find a cozy wall space to lean against. A couple who looks like different eras of Rachel Maddow turns and asks if it’s my first Punderdome. Before I can respond, roving blue lights and bass-heavy gym-techno start the show.
Looking back, I don’t know exactly what I expected. Judging by Tim’s impromptu báhn mì pun, the potential for excruciating sub-Schwarzenegger one-liners lurked like an Eastern European villain in the shadows. If I was at all pessimistic, though, I was the only one around for miles on that wavelength. There was an aura of effusive excitement because, I realized, I was somewhere nobody would dare go ironically. While a substantial chunk of Earth’s population did all they could to insulate themselves against puns, here was an industrial-size ballroom full of people gleefully hurtling toward them. Anyone who didn’t want to be here had simply báhn’d themselves.
Jo and Fred Firestone make their way toward the center of the stage at different speeds. Fred bounds out, beaming and pointing at people in the crowd, while Jo slinks across with a far more reserved smile, nodding a lot, as if to confirm inevitable news. Fred is a squat man in his early sixties whose balding hair is thick on the sides like a friar, giving his head a bulb shape. Jo is diminutive with an auburn-tinted crown of curls. She has a thin, reedy voice that sounds like a fairy tale.
“I’m Fred Firestone,” says Fred, “And this is my alleged daughter, Jo.”
“I’m definitely his daughter,” she says and turns toward Fred. “You know I’m your daughter. My mom is your wife.”
“Speaking of wives,” Fred says, and then his voice gets gruff and sputtery in the way of a Rodney Dangerfield impression that would certainly embarrass offspring. “See, I tell ya, my wife, she likes to make love in the backseat of the car. Yeah, and she likes me to drive.”
“Don’t tell them that!”
A giant screen hangs above the Firestones, bedecked with a loosely R. Crumb–style illustration of the pair riding a massive Rodney Dangerfield head. Rodney is a fitting avatar for this event, I realize. He don’t get no respect, and neither do puns.
“What should you never say on a plane when you see your friend Jack?” Fred asks, warming up the crowd. Several scattered voices yell, “Hijack!” Fred throws fun-size PayDay bars into the masses, a payday for giving the right answer. A silver-haired guy in a sleeveless Dead Kennedys shirt smiles at every joke that follows. The crowd is sufficiently warm.
Fred calls out the first round of puntestants and six people head toward the stage. As everyone gets situated, Jo hands each a small whiteboard and a marker. Then she announces the topic is Fine Arts. For the next ninety seconds, everyone scribbles furiously. While they do, a guy wearing a vintage Batman T-shirt and a chopstick in his man-bun leads the crowd in a sing-along to the Friends theme song. Tim is up first, only here he goes by Forest Wittyker, one of the first and most random pun names I hear. Because he is a regular at Punderdome, Tim will be competing against his own editors at the New York Post in the later rounds—if he makes it that far.
“I came up with a lot of fine arts puns,” he says, “but I don’t know how to frame them.”
If I had an hour to meditate on a series of puns for this topic, which would obviously be my preference, I’d never come up with a more appropriate opener. Tim had ninety seconds.
The rest of his puns are arranged into a story involving some guy who was a real “MFA-hole,” but I have a tough time concentrating because now I’m auditing my brain for puns about sculpture and decoupage. Several minutes go by and I think of zero worth sharing.
The way each round of Punderdome is decided is by audience applause, with the help of something called the human clap-o-meter. A volunteer—in this case, a college student wearing perhaps unintentional Rosie the Riveter cosplay—is asked to don a clapping apparatus. It’s a jukebox-shaped wooden board, with a face hole carved out, that volunteers hold in front of themselves. The top half is divided into color wedges, ranked from Rotten Tomato to Punderful, and there’s a spinnable arrow in the center that the volunteer points toward whichever wedge corresponds with how much the crowd loses its shit. In order to eliminate bias, the volunteer is blindfolded and the contestants are not announced by their pun names. Instead, Fred points to each in a random order, leaving the clap-o-meter to quantify anonymous applause. I do not envy her.
Forest Wittyker and a woman who goes by Homestar Punner move on to the next round, and a new group of challengers files across the stage. Among them is a duo called Daft Pun, who have fashioned tinfoil into medieval headgear like misfit knights errant. There’s also an incongruously older gentleman named Groan Up, who looks like if John Waters were from Brooklyn. The category this time is Sources of Light.
A woman in a pool table green dress and thick black glasses wins the crowd over with her knowingly meek delivery. Her name is Words Nightmare, which I don’t realize is a pun on “worst nightmare” until about three weeks later. She and Homestar Punner are among the rare female punners competing tonight, despite the diverse gender makeup of the audience.
“Watts going on?” Words Nightmare says, getting a laugh right away. She punctuates each pun with either a tilt of her head or a hand gesture, like she’s the audience’s tour guide through the vast contents of her mind.
“I hope I win tonight,” she says. “I don’t want any constellation prizes.”
With a jolt, I realize how little actual puns matter in this pun competition. If Words Nightmare had just come out and screamed “meatier shower!” it might have been an insufferable experience. Instead, she had to find the words to frame her puns, and that’s what hits the crowd’s joy sensors. (She went with “I’ve started keeping sausages by my shampoo lately. I like a meatier shower.”) Whatever this all was, it belonged in a stratospherically higher paygrade than the realm of the dad joke.
The next punster in the group calls himself A Little Kick in the Punt. He has an appealingly low-rent Coney Island kind of vibe, complete with a twirlable mustache, goatee, a
nd stick-skinny limbs he contorts into an old-timey weight lifter’s stretching pose before starting.
“I’m up here fa’ strong puns, not fa’ lame puns,” he says, frankensteining the words together so smoothly it takes me a second to catch the Source of Light invoked.
“If you need a job to go on dates, which you do,” he says, “being canned’ll be a big problem. But I have a job, so who cares. I had a date with Ellie the other night, and the whole time I’m thinking, ‘How can I give Ellie D?’”
It’s the first overtly sexual thing anyone has said tonight, and there’s an electric charge to the laughter. I look around and it occurs to me that some of the unattached English majors in the audience may end up going home with each other.
It’s no surprise Words Nightmare is voted through, but when Kick in the Punt gets a lower score than Beef Chow Pun, the audience is outraged. I am, too. It’s the most empathetic I’ve felt toward someone with a gross name since throwback rock band Diarrhea Planet failed to blow up.
In the final heat, the category is Shoes. A tall, rangy guy steps forth, dressed in all black. Later, I find out he’s A Little Kick in the Punt’s brother, even though their styles are dissimilar and they don’t look alike. His name is Jargon Slayer.
“Sometimes the prizes we get for winning this are cool, and sometimes they’re not,” he says, gesturing toward the large cardboard Mystery Boxes on the table behind him. “Those are my thoughts, re: box.”
The crowd is into it. Someone yells “Oh!” in a celestial way that sounds like a Benedictine monk chant.
“All is fair in loafer war,” he says, inciting a wave of groans that crests and somehow folds into a laugh.
Jargon Slayer keeps going with more and more shoe puns, measuring his words like they carry heavy import.
“Don’t make them out of wax, don’t fly too close to the sun,” he says, letting the silence build. “Those are my wing tips.”
After he’s done, the audience is in ecstasies. The clap-o-meter needn’t bother measuring his score—it’s a definite 10. Jargon Slayer and Words Nightmare go on to defeat the New York Post editors, which leads to even more tinnitus-threatening applause. I would not have predicted hearing such massive, overwhelming crowd love tonight—or that so much of it would come from me. But here I am, cheering at least as much as I did to bring Gnarls Barkley back for an encore years ago. Some of these puns are legitimately clever, and some are irresistibly bad. The audience seemed just as happy laughing as they were groaning. It’s a revelation. As a person whose default setting was anxiety, I could only envy these performers’ ability to spontaneously craft the most reviled form of joke in front of five hundred people. This had to be the only place in the world where such a thing could happen. But it definitely was not.
The O. Henry Pun-Off, the world’s foremost pun competition, has been an Austin institution since 1978. It’s a marathon of wordplay consisting of two main events spread across one long, linguistically fluid day. First up is Punniest of Show. Competitors perform a two-minute routine on a theme of their own choosing for hundreds of sun-beaten pun-funnelers. The other event is far more difficult. Punslingers is a breakneck thirty-two-person tournament where players go head-to-head, punning on all manner of topics, in front of two MCs and six judges. The opponents trade puns like boxing jabs, except it’s the audience who feels like they’re being pummeled. There’s a five-second time limit for each turn, and the pair keeps going until either person runs out of puns about, say, country music. Meanwhile, the MCs can chime in like referees to disqualify nonpuns. All told, the day lasts something like seven hours. Some people fly halfway around the world to attend.
In creating Punderdome, the Firestones split the difference between the two O. Henry events, inventing a completely separate beast. It was only a few months after Punderdome began that word traveled down to Austin about it. The O. Henry organizers had seen similar scrappy competitions spring up and flame out since 1978. They had no idea whether the Brooklyn upstart would have any longevity, but lines of communication soon opened between them. Representatives from either side visited the other. As more and more Domers found out about the O. Henry, they started traveling down South to compete. Being crowned best punster in Brooklyn any given month was a nice incentive, but competing in Austin carried the possibility of becoming a literal world champion. What drove a person to pursue such a goal? Was it like the opposite of the Williams sisters, with parents organizing interventions instead of aggressively encouraging? I was determined to find out.
It’s impossible to leave a pun competition without looking closer at the words that wallpaper your world. For instance, the day after Punderdome, I stared at Chipotle subway ads that read “Bon Appetaco” and “Porkadise Found” and tried to top them. (“Burritoyeah” and “Fajit’s sake” were my best offerings at the time.) A switch had flipped on in my brain. I was developing RoboCop vision for pun possibilities. Every phrase was one tweak away from a double meaning. Suddenly, I was a thirty-five-year-old who guffawed when he realized that plans to commit incest could be called Oedipal arrangements.
Society and Leonardo DiCaprio had brainwashed me to be a self-hating pun monster, but perhaps I only hated puns in certain moments. I rolled my eyes at the ones in ads and lifestyle magazines, the ones that dressed a concept up in an ill-fitting business suit of “fun,” and I sucked my teeth when somebody made a pun on whatever we were talking about five minutes ago, the context long since evaporated. But I was firmly on board with what I’d heard last night. Maybe I’d been wrong about other things as well.
Later that day, I decided to go to the next Punderdome, and probably the one after that. It was partly because I just wanted to hear more dope puns, and partly because I wanted what these performers had. Not the contents of the Mystery Box, which turned out to be a BeDazzler, but something intangible. I wanted their ability to find the right thing to say at the right time. The contestants had reminded me of all the snappy comebacks I’d never made, all the TV dialogue too sparkling to be real, the promise of being perpetually unstuck, a wellspring of spontaneity. These people were either performing at Punderdome because they were good at thinking on their feet, or they were good at thinking on their feet because they performed at Punderdome. Either way, I wanted to find out more about them and join them onstage. If they went to the O. Henry, I wanted to join them there, too. Over the next year, I discovered exactly what kind of individuals devote themselves to punning, and how they spent the rest of their time. Some turned out to be comedians, actors, and slam poets; others were software developers and ergonomic engineers. They punned out of a lifelong fascination, or obsession, or because they simply could not stop. They were more fun to hang out with than that sounds.
I also decided to investigate some other situations that are similar to pun competitions. I would explore TV’s closest thing to Punderdome, @Midnight, where the comedy elite goes for guilt-free punning, and visit the headquarters of the punniest show on TV, Bob’s Burgers. I’d investigate how New York Post headline writers come up with concise wording quickly, and what neuroscientists know about what happens in our brains as we’re mangling language. I would dig deep into this world, hear stories from its inhabitants, and experience it all for myself. I would become Punter S. Thompson.
2
Welcome to the Punderdome
Like wedding cakes, most trophies come topped with miniature depictions of the people they belong to. Think of the golf trophy with its gleaming golden swinger, midstroke, or the diving trophy whose arched bronzed merman looks to be transporting heavy furniture. The trophy for the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, though, comes in the shape of a horse’s ass, as if to caution winners against the sin of hubris. A trophy in this shape succinctly sums up what it means to be the best at something a lot of people consider the worst.
Way more pun competitions exist than most sane civilians might presume. There’s Minnesota’s Pundamonium, Orlando Punslingers, the UK Pun Champi
onships, the Almost Annual Pun-Off in Eureka, California, and several others. The O. Henry is without a doubt the Olympics of pun competitions, though, and Punderdome is their X Games. Both events also have their beloved champions who sometimes cross over to the other side. These heroes just tend to grace far fewer Wheaties boxes.
One of the first things to establish when getting into any new sport is who is its Michael Jordan. Even mildly serious competitive bowlers quickly learn about Earl Anthony, the Michael Jordan of bowling. Unfortunately, there’s no Elo rating system to rank punsters like chess players and eSports all-stars. I searched online for a Guinness World Record along the lines of Most Decorated Competitive Wordsmith, to no avail. As far as Guinness is aware, pun competitions do not even exist. Considering there’s a world record for Most Candles Blown Out by a Single Fart, though (five, if you’re wondering), the sports trivia canon probably also has room for a competition that’s been around almost forty years and has roots that run far deeper in cultural history. I applied online to establish one.
On the submission form, there’s a field for nominating the record-holder. The name I gave is Benjamin Ziek. It didn’t take much research to see that he was the most dominant player the competitive pun world has ever seen.
Ziek is buzz-cut and built like a cross between a circus strongman and Sopranos consigliere, complete with tree-trunk calves. For the past six years, he has never left the Austin competition without taking home a horse’s ass or two, winning Punslingers four times, Punniest of Show twice, and Most Valuable Punster twice as well. His day job is night auditor at a Marriott in Burbank, but he also manages a team for Millennium Pro Wrestlers—and occasionally gets in the ring himself, under the name Lex Icon. (Think of him as independent wrestling’s answer to Bobby “The Brain” Heenan.) Although Ziek has experience with stand-up and improv, his main area of expertise is the quick thinking and deep reservoirs of trivia that are the cornerstones of the game-show circuit. He is a game-show junkie through and through, with a side business that delivers a game-show experience like a traveling carnival midway.
Away with Words Page 2