Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  Ziek has made appearances on five separate TV game shows and won thousands of dollars. In fact, he only made it to O. Henry for the first time, in 2009, after winning $4,400 the previous year on 1 vs. 100 and splurging on a plane ticket. His dream, he tells me, is to create a TV show where he travels around the country winning pun competitions, which seems like the kind of optimism that fuels third-party presidential candidacies. Ziek is a Gatling gun of puns that has only rarely jammed. He is clearly the Michael Jordan of the pun world. But just as a slew of physically gifted souls like Shaun White, the Flying Tomato, have managed to win at both the Olympics and the X Games, some verbal athletes have found glory at both the O. Henry and Punderdome. Among this small few, the Flying Tomato of pun competitions must be Jerzy Gwiazdowski. (The trick to unlocking the pronunciation of that last name is using his house key.)

  After the New York Post event, I wanted to know everything about Jargon Slayer. Who exactly was this linguistic conquistador? I asked Tim, my conduit to the pun world, to connect us through Facebook, and he obliged. A couple weeks later, Jerzy and I are in the backyard of a Brooklyn bar called Crown Inn, sitting at a picnic table lit by a mason jar candle.

  “I’ve always been a words guy,” he says, brushing a Weird Al lock of sternum-length hair out of his eye. “You could say I’ve languished in language my whole life.”

  Language has served Jerzy Gwiazdowski well. The plays he’s written have been produced on four continents, and as an actor, he once took over for Domhnall Gleeson as the lead in a Broadway show. When he’s not teaching playwriting workshops or working odd jobs, Jerzy plays small roles on TV shows like Girls, Nurse Jackie, and the various Law & Orders that are prerequisites for any self-respecting New York actor. Lately, though, these kinds of parts have started drying up. These days, Jerzy Gwiazdowski is best known for punning—a talent nearly impossible to make a living at.

  Jerzy has earned two of the three major awards at O. Henry, and he’s won Punderdome so many times he’s lost count (fourteen). Like Ben Ziek, he wants to travel around the world to compete in every available pun competition, only he has no plans to pitch a show about it. Also like Ben Ziek, he only made it to his first O. Henry thanks to a sudden windfall—though Jerzy’s came from a kick-ass tax refund and not a game-show victory.

  After putting this found money toward a plane ticket to Austin, Jerzy promptly began to freak out. Maybe his competitors took puns way more seriously than he did, receiving black-ops training at some clandestine pun-dojo. Jerzy googled “NYC pun contest,” fishing for any way to practice the dark art of wordplay, and discovered Punderdome, which was then in its second year. Under the name Do Pun to Others he competed for the first time and took second place against Tim. The following month, he came out on top. By the time he traveled down to Austin in the spring of 2012, Jerzy felt confident about his Punniest of Show monologue, a clever routine about states and capitals. Not only did Jerzy win, but the video of his performance ended up creating a rare viral moment for the O. Henry, getting upvoted onto the front page of Reddit.

  “So, the time you won the O. Henry, that’s online?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “And we can watch it right now, hypothetically?”

  “I mean, yeah,” he says, shrugging. “If you want.”

  I do want. Through a tiny iPhone screen, within napkin-flinging distance of a pair of chatty crust punks, I get my first glimpse of the O. Henry. It’s an outdoor stage in broad daylight, populated by two older southern gents in goofy hats. The background is bisected lengthwise, with the top half resembling a deconstructed Texas flag, and the bottom half a colorful triptych the shade of Miss Piggy, Kermit, and Scooter, respectively. My eyes feel assaulted. Soon, a rail-thin Jerzy cautiously walks to the center of the stage and begins.

  “Baby, you’ve got me in a state, and I fear that it’s contiguous,” he says. “I’m-in-it-sorta deep here. Why don’t you-talk. I know what you’re thinking: I knew-him, sure. But he cut me off, and now he wants to connect-a-cut.”

  Midway through the routine, he starts nimbly stacking sentences like Tetris pieces to put the state and the capital in a row. (“I know a lad can get lonely, and Juneau a lass can too.”) It’s a dazzling strategy. It kills.

  The video of Jerzy’s first O. Henry visit racked up over 150,000 YouTube hits, which in terms of punning is like two or three “Gangnam Style”s. Suddenly, Jerzy was fielding interview requests from curiosity blogs and Australian radio stations. In as much as one can attain celebrity status in the narrow field of pun competitions, Jerzy was a hot rookie sensation.

  Over the next year, he sustained his momentum by competing at Punderdome, frequently in triumph. When he returned to Austin for his sophomore O. Henry, though, he blew it.

  “I wanted a challenge,” Jerzy says, hefting his hefeweizen.

  What he gave himself was a suicide mission: a routine based on the books of the Old Testament, in order. Even in the notoriously bible-friendly state of Texas, there were no guarantees anybody would understand what he was saying.

  The Bible is not inherently unpunnable. Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri, who has also won at both O. Henry and Punderdome, snatched the crown with her bible routine that very year. But Jerzy’s attempt was ambitious to a fault.

  “Bible scholars want to know what our species’ entrance was, but I want to know what our genus’s exit is,” he begins, with the fury of a Sermon on the Mount. “So I turned to math. When I like math, I hug an equation. When I love it, I kiss numbers.”

  Whenever Jerzy stops to catch his breath, face-melting awkward silences hang in the air. You can hear people clear their throats above the windless air. It’s not pretty. As he continues, Jerzy starts chuckling nervously, to fill the void of zero crowd reaction. You can almost see the moment he decides to just power through and get this failed Hail Mary over with.

  “Boy, it’s hard to do a two-peat, isn’t it?” O. Henry director Gary Hallock says after it’s over, a touch of glee in his voice. “Not sure I find that routine . . . wholly buyable.”

  Jerzy did not attend the Pun-Off the following year.

  When he did go again in 2015, with two years of Punderdome under his belt, it was a return to form. He nabbed MVP and came in second for Punslingers, losing only against Ben Ziek. The final round between the two was the longest in the event’s history. For forty-eight minutes, Ziek and Jerzy went back and forth on the topic of numerical phrases such as “three’s a crowd,” which seems impossible. It’s tough for me to imagine making puns on this topic for even just forty-eight seconds without disappearing from the stage in a panicky moonwalk.

  At Punslingers, quantity trumps quality. The puns don’t win points for being clever or funny; they just have to hold up as puns under the scrutiny of the judges. Whoever runs out of punnable phrases loses, and in this case, it fell to Jerzy. It wasn’t the first time Ben Ziek defeated him either.

  “He’s my Salieri. Or I’m his Mozart. I don’t know which,” Jerzy says of his frequent opponent. “I’m gonna beat him next year, though. I have to.”

  Before Jerzy and Ziek can rematch again in Austin, though, there are pressing matters back here in Brooklyn. After winning the last three Punderdomes in a row, Jerzy is gearing up for an unprecedented fourth. Nobody has won that many consecutive months in the nearly five years of the event’s history. Making matters more interesting, he’ll be vying for this honor against Punky Brewster, the only Dome champion who has won as often as Jerzy. Punky hasn’t competed in months but she’s rumored to be due for a homecoming.

  “I’ve gotta see that,” I say.

  “You’re not just gonna see it, right?” Jerzy says. “Aren’t you punticipating, too?”

  He’s right. It’s time.

  The line at Littlefield, home of Punderdome, is already Disney ride–length forty-five minutes before showtime. I kill time twirling a loose ivy vine that clings to the building’s brick façade, actively tuning out a woman in g
olden zebra pants ranting about the rugrats she teaches.

  After a few minutes, Fred Firestone begins surveying the crowd. Without his trademark Hawaiian shirt on, Fred doesn’t seem quite in character yet. He’s still bubbly and chatty, though, clutching a bunch of large gold rectangles whose resemblance to Wonka factory tickets seems intentional. He sidles up to people on line in a way that reminds me of Washington Square Park weed dealers. When he gets close, he asks whether I’m competing and I tell him I think so.

  “Well, are you or aren’t you?”

  “I am!” I assure him. “But I don’t have to, if more regulars show up and they need spots.”

  Fred shoots me a look like I just offered to tend bar in exchange for a place to sleep, and he says it’s fine. He hands me a golden slip. Then he peers past me, and his face lights up.

  “Hey, look at this guy,” Fred calls out, walking over to where Jerzy has just joined the line. Jerzy seems embarrassed but maybe more like he’s putting on a show of seeming embarrassed.

  “Do you know who this fella is?” Fred asks the guy behind me, who looks preppy but not in the way of high school bullies—more like their sidekicks. “Let’s just say you don’t want to go on after him.”

  Preppy Guy smiles.

  Jerzy and Fred know each other well. As the pioneer Punderdomer to compete at O. Henry, Jerzy’s since become a diplomat for the two competitions, helping them forge a relationship.

  Fred soon leaves, and Jerzy joins me in line. He’s recovering from a hangover and he looks it, dark beneath the eyes and slouchy in stature. After workshopping a play, he spent last night watching a Packers game and consumed a beer for each of Aaron Rodgers’s touchdown passes.

  “And when I woke up this morning,” he says, “the room was a perfect spiral.”

  There’s usually a tone of expectation at the end of a pun, demanding a reaction from the recipient. Even though puns run rampant in this place, I don’t quite know how to react to this first one delivered so casually in conversation. I could fake-laugh, but I would hate that and Jerzy would probably hate it, too. The polite thing to do is to volley a pun right back at him. I rack my brain for football words I can jam into the context of alcohol or being hungover. I remain racking for several seconds. Good thing you have a gridiron stomach drifts by like turgid wind, and I decide not to say it or anything else. Jerzy takes this opportunity to check his phone.

  Once we’re inside, he reminds me I have to come up with a nom de pun to give Jo Firestone when she takes my golden ticket. Jargon Slayer is a snazzy name. I’d love something like that. But there’s barely time to come up with anything. My first thought is Punnilingus. Aside from the fact that this name seems like what Terry Richardson would pick if he were blackmailed into competing at Punderdome, I don’t want the first thing I say to Jo Firestone to be “punnilingus.” My next thought is Punter S. Thompson and it feels so appropriate I have to restrain my fist from involuntarily shooting up in the air like Bender at the end of The Breakfast Club.

  “Good one!” Jo says as she hands me a giant name tag to write my new name on.

  The crowd seems more relaxed here on their home turf than they did at the Highline Ballroom last month. A trio of women forms a skyline of severe bangs near the bar, laughing. One of them is wearing a romper with half-peeled bananas printed all over it. The area by the bar is partitioned off from the show room by a thick black curtain. A few eager beavers are strategically positioned right next to it, ready to pounce on the prime seats when the curtain is drawn. Only a couple people besides Jerzy and myself have donned name tags. Everybody else is here for the show. Baristas and web developers, assistant librarians and artisanal mayonnaise store employees. All of them just enjoying a night out with some artisanally crafted puns. It suddenly hits me that I’m about to be part of their entertainment—with no script, no practice, and no idea what the hell I’m doing. I feel like I just left the house for a long trip and I forgot to pack the right things or turn off the oven or get directions but I’m too far away to turn back. I try to think of anything entertaining to say, not even a pun necessarily, and nothing comes. I guess failure can be entertaining?

  Soon, a tan, relaxed dude with a stubbly goatee and a widow’s peak joins Jerzy and me. His name tag reads Punder Enlightening, but he introduces himself as Isaac. He’s a friend of Jerzy’s who also works in theater, directing several plays a year.

  “Rekha’s coming tonight,” Isaac confirms. “First time in months, I hear. But I haven’t been here in months either.”

  Jerzy nods slowly at this announcement, like a chef evaluating the sous chef’s sauce. Rekha Shankar is Punky Brewster, Jerzy’s friendly rival at Punderdome. The anticipated face-off is happening after all.

  “I know I say this every time, but I’m really feeling off tonight,” he says.

  “Never seems to stop you,” Isaac responds.

  The two clink beer bottles and then Jerzy turns to me. “Isaac and I met in college. Back in my halcyon days.”

  Jerzy was two years ahead of Isaac at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he’d established himself as the campus’s own personal Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, booking leads in every project. When Jerzy sat in on a lower-level movement class one day, Isaac was even a little starstruck. The two started seeing each other at parties, though, and soon they began to hang out, verbally jousting through games of Monopoly, making gross puns about Community Chest and Baltic Avenue. Years later, after Jerzy started winning at Punderdome, he encouraged Isaac to come along. It wasn’t long before the two friends were regularly going toe-to-toe in the final round, with Isaac sometimes coming out on top.

  “What even are halcyon days?” Isaac asks.

  “You know, the good old days,” Jerzy says. “The salad days.”

  “If anyone actually refers to their best days as ‘salad days,’ though, those days probably weren’t so great,” I point out. Jerzy and Isaac suddenly look deep in thought.

  Jerzy speaks first. “I don’t know, I’ve heard that word tossed around a lot.”

  Isaac nods. “It’s something that needs a-dressing.”

  “Don’t be radicchio.”

  “You’re arugula contender.”

  They parry back and forth so quickly I can’t jump in, even if I had something good to add, which I don’t. But I desperately want to get in on whatever this is.

  “In a crowd of thousands, he’s where their eyes-land,” I blurt out.

  Yikes. My instinct is to apologize, so I do. Jerzy and Isaac kind of shrug with their faces. A bad pun here apparently isn’t the party foul it might be elsewhere. Apologizing actually throws the rhythm off more than a bad pun, so maybe that’s the party foul. Everything is upside-down. What this revelation means, though, is that at least I probably won’t hear anyone say “pardon the pun” tonight. I hate when people say that, as if the pun were a malevolent spirit who briefly puppeteered their vocal cords; as if they hadn’t spoken up in the first place specifically to say that pun, just before disavowing it. People who say “pardon the pun” are slippery hucksters not to be trusted.

  Once the black curtain parts, the crowd surges in to claim seats. Every last one is promptly filled, and the overflow spills out to each of the room’s nooks and most of its crannies, including the concave space beneath the sound engineer booth. Many of the people lined up to cram in are left standing by the bar, a traffic jam turned parking lot.

  A woman with a neat tidal wave of sandy brown hair, shaved close on one side, greets Jerzy with a hug.

  “Remember me?” she asks, and Jerzy smiles stiffly, like he can’t remember whether this is a friend or foe.

  Her name is Ariel, which I will not forget because she’s wearing an ocean blue sweater with Ariel the Little Mermaid across the torso. Ariel was apparently in town a couple months ago interviewing for a job on a political TV show, when she randomly heard about Punderdome. She competed that night, as P-Witty, and managed to make it to the seco
nd round. Ariel’s back tonight, having landed the job, for her first Dome as a New York resident. After they shoot the shit for a minute, Jerzy does in fact remember her and even remembers one of her puns.

  Ariel soon leaves to greet a friend, and I let Jerzy go off to “get in his zone,” as he says. Looking for a place to stand, I burrow through the crowd to a spot in the corner. A conspicuous couple of Brooks Brothers bros scowl as they make room. Nearby, a woman with a caramel complexion and a red hoodie hunkers down in a squat, listening to headphones and swaying slightly. I can’t decide whether this antisocial gesture means she’s in the wrong place or exactly the right one.

  Several INXS and ABBA songs later, the fifty-sixth monthly Punderdome is under way. As Jo and Fred Firestone warm up the crowd, my stomach continues its slow descent into new submarinal dimensions.

  “So, for all intents and purposes tonight, a pun is going to be a play on words,” Jo says from the stage. “Anything squarer than that, just, we can’t. We’ve been drinking too much, so that’s the main rule.”

  After hearing Jerzy’s stories about how strict the rules are at the O. Henry, this is a relief. It doesn’t seem to be a direct swipe at the Austin punsters—both sides are friendly with each other—but maybe it’s a subtle nose-thumbing in their direction. This is, defiantly, a no-holds-barred pun competition. In fact, the whole operation feels vaguely like a wrestling league, with the beloved champions and the goofy fake names. Fred and Jo Firestone are like the Vince and Stephanie McMahon of the pun circuit. Well, maybe if the WWF had been Stephanie’s idea and Vince had fewer shady political ties.