My cursory investigation into the work of O. Henry had borne this idea out. Although he did name one of his stories “A Midsummer Knight’s Dream,” the author’s work is largely pun-free. For all anyone knew, O. Henry in fact hated puns, but he was more likely just too busy being a garbage monster to his wife to form a concrete opinion on them. Any correlations that could be made between William Sidney Porter and pun competitions are tenuous at best. The author was under the gun with his weekly contract, so he had to force himself to be creative in a narrow window of time—a challenge he shares with Pun-Off participants. Also, a twist ending itself is a misdirection that makes its audience think one thing while the story does another. In a very loose and generous sense, that is what a pun does—even if most puns usually just sound like a minor speech impediment. The truth may simply be that O. Henry lived in a house that became a museum and whose vast public backyard eventually attracted a pun competition. It’s a perfectly fine explanation for why the event came to be named after the author. A bit of a reach, maybe, but what is punning if not a series of exceptional reaches? How the Pun-Off ended up existing in the first place is a whole other story.
Pun competitions seem like something that could only exist in the frivolous present, or like some weird bullshit I made up. But according to John Pollack, who wrote the definitive book on puns, The Pun Also Rises, they actually go way back.
“This is something that crosses all major languages and cultures in history,” Pollack says over the phone.
Apparently, wherever you are in the world, just about, a precedent exists of people trying to top each other with wordplay for various reasons. There’s an ages-old tradition among Chamulan men near San Juan, in which they hold verbal duels called k’ehel k’op, often involving puns. (The example Pollack offers is convoluted and loses something in translation, but it definitely hinges on an insult about scrotums.) Pun-filled poetry duels have also been a fixture at Palestinian weddings for centuries. In the United States, pun competitions have even found their way into politics from time to time. An 1850 debate over slavery between Senators Lewis Cass and Horace Mann, for instance, turned into a bizarre ad hominem pun-off, one that seems highly inappropriate in retrospect, given what was at stake. The O. Henry is the longest-running official pun competition in history, though, in addition to being the most prestigious and the most rigorous.
There are conflicting stories about how the event was born. Some say its roots are inextricably tied to Austin’s annual block party, the Pecan Street Festival, which began in 1978—the same year as the first recorded O. Henry. The apocryphal tale is that during the festival, a crowd organically gathered in the open space behind the museum known as Brush Square, and an informal pun cipher broke out. The impromptu event was so much fun that everyone agreed to do it again the following year, and thus a tradition shrugged into existence. A lot of people make puns by accident; of course they might also make a pun competition by accident.
Except maybe they didn’t. Gary Hallock, the director of the O. Henry for the past twenty-five years, has his doubts. Digging through the archives recently, he came across fliers for the first-ever Pun-Off. Their mere existence casts doubt on any account of the event originating spontaneously. The fliers ask interested parties to submit puns and limericks in writing for a contest, and to attend an award ceremony at the museum. (If you think the Oscars can get tedious, imagine a limerick contest acceptance speech.) Somehow this almost oppressively boring-sounding event evolved into a pun-off.
Although Gary is unsure which version of the origin story is absolutely true, those earliest days are the only ones he can’t discuss with eyewitness authority. Gary became a competitor in the mid-’80s, before retiring to join the organizing committee in 1990. Now, he is the unquestioned capo di tutti capi of the O. Henry Pun-Off, with a stronger connection to it than anyone else alive. He’s the reason I have come to Austin.
Although it’s become passé by now, one longtime mantra of this city is Keep Austin Weird. It’s splashed across T-shirts sold at Zilker Park during the annual Kite Festival, it’s plastered on paint-peeled bumpers of Toyota Tercels en route to yarn-bomb a tree, probably, and it’s nowhere near the nude bodies undulating in the clothing-optional swimming park called Hippie Hollow. Although the vast empire of high-rises and high-end restaurants have added a slick sheen recently, Austin is still indeed weird. Its weirdness is thrust upon you the moment you arrive at the airport, greeted by fifteen-foot, psychedelically colored guitars in a V-formation around the baggage claim, as if standing sentry lest ill-tempered mutant drums invade. If the town in Footloose was weird for outlawing dancing, Austin seems like the type of weird where dancing might be enforced on certain government holidays. It’s a weirdness that encompasses Brooklyn’s, in that both places seem like they might have a hopscotch league, but Austin’s stands out more for being an oasis in the reddest of red states. The friends I’m staying with live next to a chrome rocket of a food trailer called Ms P’s Electric Cock, and a wax museum that looks like a grimy gothic castle with functional dungeon. When I go for a run, it’s over a bridge known colloquially as Bat Bridge, for reasons I don’t want spelled out until I am far away from the bridge. This city is undeniably weird and the O. Henry Pun-Off belongs here.
Punning itself may not be that weird, but the ceaseless spigot of puns that flows unimpeded at the Pun-Off might as well be directed by David Cronenberg. To oblivious passersby, it must sound like a foreign language one intuitively knows to be Elvish or Klingon, a knotty thicket of nerd twaddle. To the people inside, though, it’s paradise. Anywhere else, the chance of being overheard could be embarrassing, but not here. Those who are magnetically pulled to the Pun-Off are like Amish teens on Rumspringa. For one weekend, any and all interruptive, conversation-killing word balloon animals are not only welcome—they’re encouraged. There is no safe word here. (If there were, though, it would be a pun and it would be horrible.)
For Gary Hallock, an old school Austinite, this sanctuary has no exit. Puns are an indelible part of his life, year-round. The green zone this town has created for ardent wordplay enthusiasts has encroached ever further into Hallock’s head, annexing his brain and claiming it as pun country.
Beneath a rotating haberdashery of unconventional headgear, Gary has a friendly face with soft-blue eyes and deep-set laugh lines, probably collateral pun damage. His hair is the color of sidewalk, but his bushy eyebrows are a shade darker. He has a rascally gleam in his eye, like he’s always either just heard a joke or is about to deliver one. As Gary tells me his life story, though, he slips in very few puns. It’s unclear whether the omission is for my benefit—all the unmade puns quietly eating him up inside. Puns are there in his waking hours, and they’re there when he goes to sleep.
“I put music on in the background at night to keep the idle parts of my brain from thinking about puns,” Gary tells me. “I fall asleep with a little speaker in my pillow, listening to talk radio, because if I don’t, I will lie awake thinking of stuff, and inevitably, I’ll think of a pun, and then I’ll wish I could get up and go write it down.”
We’re inside of a vegan ice cream shop in North Austin that Gary’s friend Valerie Ward owns. You can tell one of Gary’s friends owns it because we’re seated perpendicular to a doctored poster for the film A Time to Kill that now reads A Time to Kale. A young Matthew McConaughey, sleek as an otter, is arguing a court case, his clenched, emotive fist made to look as if it’s clutching a stalk of kale. When I gesture toward it, Gary chortles. He has probably heard or said the word kale in place of kill thousands of times more than the average human.
Gary became a punster by default. Growing up, he’d strived to be a comedian, dutifully going to open mics and doing his time onstage. It just never gelled, though. All it took was one round at the O. Henry for him to realize he was a punster who enjoyed comedy and not a comedian who enjoyed puns. Gary admires stand-up comics who can get away with puns, but he recognizes that they’re few a
nd far between. (He cites as an example Carrot Top, the shockingly jacked prop comedy golem fated to haunt Las Vegas forever like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.) Following that first O. Henry, Gary spent the next thirty years deeply involved in pun competitions. It’s long since become an integral part of his identity. He may be a property manager by trade, but that’s not who he is. He is Mr. Pun.
“When you have a reputation like I do, any time I open my mouth, people are expecting it, and bracing for it, and cringing,” he says. “When I start talking, I can sense that tension. People are waiting for me to throw a pun in. So if I do go ahead and throw one in to relieve the tension, people think that’s the point I was trying to make, and they miss the point. It’s like dressing in a clown costume and expecting people to take you seriously. Because I’m basically in a clown costume 24/7.”
Gary first competed in the Pun-Off in 1985, and did not do particularly well. He kept coming back, though, until he won first place four years later. At that point, he decided to retire, going out on top like when Michael Strahan left the Giants and also when he left Live! With Kelly & Michael. Gary sensed that the competition had grown a tad stale over the past few years and needed some shaking up. When he spoke to the museum curator about it, she charged him with restoring the O. Henry to its former glory the following year. Gary accepted, forming a committee of like-minded word-nerds to assist with the reformation, and founding a group called PUNY—Punsters United Nearly Yearly. Together, they codified some long unspoken rules of the competition. They also added “World Championships” to the title, so that upstarts like the Almost Annual Pun Competition in Eureka, California, wouldn’t beat them to the punch.
On my flight down to Austin, I watched a documentary called Pun-Smoke, which chronicled the twenty-fifth annual O. Henry Pun-Off back in 2002. It cost $35 on eBay and is definitely nowhere to be found for free on YouTube or any of the less sketchy torrent sites. Pun-Smoke was only thirteen years old when I watched it, but it already felt like an artifact from a bygone era. The movie exists in a moment that would become the precise dividing line between what the O. Henry was in the 1980s and 1990s, and what it is now.
Pun-Smoke follows the rivalry between Alex “The Terminator” Ramirez, a graybeard with a fishmouth who always looks immensely satisfied with himself, and Brian Oakley, a relative newcomer in a Hawaiian shirt who seems rather laid-back until he gets started on the subject of Pun-Off strategy, which he does often. (Gary is there, too, rocking what looks to be a train conductor’s cap with two tweaked Kermit eyes on top.) During one Punslingers skirmish, Ramirez and Oakley stand in front of an enormous American flag, flinging puns back and forth, sometimes in Q&A form, like a knock-knock joke tennis match. It gets intense. Even after meeting people like Jerzy, it’s surprising how seriously people in the film take the competition and punning in general. One of the players drives a Mustang GT whose license plate reads “LV-2 PUN,” which seems like a thing one should be legally required to put on their online dating profile. What’s most striking about the movie is how different this world seems from Punderdome, where the oldest person onstage, besides Fred Firestone, is maybe thirty-five years old and also me. I’d be shocked if any of the competitors in Pun-Smoke had not yet had a colonoscopy.
Everything changed within a few years, though. The improv scene in Austin galvanized around 2005, and several of those performers started competing in the O. Henry Pun-Off. This infusion of fresh creative blood, bringing in talented punsters like Dav Wallace, Matt Pollock, and vegan ice cream impresario Valerie Ward, arrived just as some of the old guard featured in Pun-Smoke, like Brian Oakley and David Gugenheim, retired to join Gary Hallock on the organizing committee. Around the same time, YouTube revolutionized the possibilities of viewing videos. Punniest of Show routines and Punslingers showdowns soon began to circulate online. Not only did these videos spread awareness of competitive punning to people who didn’t know it existed, they also served as a comprehensive how-to manual. Between the improv contingent’s creativity and YouTube’s instructional power, competition suddenly got a lot stiffer. What followed was an entirely new breed of turbo-punster like Ben Ziek and Jerzy Gwiazdowski.
In less than five years, Punderdome has already undergone a similar quantum leap in the skills of its top players. The people who won at the earliest Punderdomes would not stand a chance against Punky Brewster or Words Nightmare. They’ve since become dodo birds in the survival of the wittiest. This is the kind of evolution that happens in any competitive medium over a long enough timeline. It’s the same reason the home run arms race escalated so much in late-1990s pro baseball, minus the steroids. (Pun competition steroids consist of hours spent practicing, and possibly beta-blockers.)
However, Gary doesn’t think the Domers are as fully developed as the O. Henry crowd, and he’s not shy about it.
About a month after my first Punderdome, a vacationing Gary finally attended the Brooklyn event himself for the first time ever. It was a raucous post-Halloween show dominated by Isaac, who narrowly beat out Jerzy and also tied for first in the costume contest—dressed as an Internet Explorer in a safari outfit covered with cookies, open Tabs (the soda), and a sign over his junk that read private browsing.
Gary was not impressed.
“It was everything I feared it might be and more: alcohol, indoor venue, and loose rules, ” he says, shaking his head. He didn’t keep his distaste a secret that night, either.
At one point, Jo Firestone invited Gary onstage to pitch the crowd on the O. Henry. “If you like this, you’ll love Austin,” he said. “Except down there we demand you make real puns.” I’ve heard more enticing ads for unanesthecized dental surgery.
What Gary means by “not real” is something he calls a Matt Lauer Pun. It’s a withering qualifier for wordplay that involves a phrase related to the topic, but lacking the actual substitution that gives a pun its bona fides. (Why exactly Matt Lauer has been singled out is unclear, but I suspect it comes down to Gary having caught the Today show on a particularly rough morning.) It’s something he vigilantly opposes at O. Henry.
“We catch a lot of heat for it sometimes when the contestants say something that’s really funny but not a pun,” Gary says. “The crowd boos and everybody groans like ‘Give him a break, it was funny!’ Yes, maybe it was, but it was not a pun!”
Gary punctuates his point by wagging his finger and giving me a deep aha! look.
“If the topic is railroads, we will not accept anything like, ‘I hope we stay on track.’ That’s a Matt Lauer Pun.”
“What about ‘Keep it rail?’ I ask, and he nods vigorously.
The other issue Gary had with his visit to Punderdome was that it wasn’t dirty enough. This is surprising since O. Henry is a more family-friendly show, and in only a few trips to Punderdome I’ve already heard at least half of the Kama Sutra translated into sex puns.
“One of the categories when I was at Punderdome was The Bathroom, so right away I go to bathroom humor,” Gary says. “But none of the contestants did anything risqué or bathroom humor–like. Nothing feces-tious. They did tile, plumbing, a bar of soap. But they could’ve gone a whole other way.”
“A . . . hole other way?” I cut in, and Gary ignores me.
“They could’ve done much more actual bathroom humor.”
“‘I don’t want a piece of victory, I like my glory whole,’” I say.
Gary stares blankly for a moment and says, “You don’t have to impress me, Joe.”
Just as the level of gameplay has advanced over the years, the organizers and judges have had to change the way they create and police the game itself. In the same way that Top Chef continually introduces tougher ingredient combinations to match the versatility of contestants who’ve watched years of Top Chef, the O. Henry organizers keep raising the bar ever skyward. Any potential new topic is as heavily vetted as Supreme Court justices (a topic that incidentally seems like one that would end up in Punslingers). In the lead-up to the Pun
-Off each year, Gary meets with his fellow organizers to field-test topics and make sure they’ll be challenging enough for the likes of Ziek and Jerzy. When Gary mentions that the team is still refining this year’s topics, I ask if I can join in on a session. After a moment of consideration, Gary whips out a chunky cell phone and arranges a summit the following day with David Gugenheim and Brian Oakley, the new O. Henry director and the champion from Pun-Smoke, respectively. It’s on.
“I’m just warning you, though, if you get the three of us in a room together, there’ll be so many puns on puns on puns, it’ll drive you nuts,” Gary says, his eyes projecting grave concern. “Like, actual Looney Tunes.”
It was a risk I was willing to take.
We’re sitting on the rustically kitsch patio of a spot called Spider House and I feel summarily outhipped by the entire bar. In every direction, there are overtattooed, adventurously coiffed college students lounging in mismatched lawn furniture sets beneath rickety umbrellas. Meanwhile, the median age at this table is roughly fifty-three and one of us is wearing a T-shirt that reads puns not guns.
The last to arrive is Gary, he of the aforementioned T-shirt. He is late because he has neither texting capability nor voice mail on his phone, and he’d been waiting for one of us to call and give him directions—which of course nobody did. I recognize Brian Oakley from Pun-Smoke, though he looks more weathered and gray than he did in 2002. David Gugenheim looks familiar, too, although he was less of a pronounced presence in Pun-Smoke. Brian works as a nurse, and David is in advertising, where he tries to jam puns into the taglines of every assignment that comes across his desk. He has the kind of perfectly round head most bald men hope for, with a white Vandyke beard like closely cropped Spanish moss. Both are known as equally talented punsters, although Brian is the only one David faced off against in their day whom he never beat.
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