Brian has brought a leather satchel filled with this year’s O. Henry Pun-Off topics, which he carries with the gravity of a henchman handcuffed to the nuclear codes. Together these papers tell the story of how this process has changed over time. The organizers used to cycle through the same fifty topics each year, but not anymore. The committee is now dedicated to continual fine-tuning, putting potential new topics through rigorous scrutiny. The team challenges itself to wring at least fifty commonly associated words out of each prospective topic before officially advancing it into rotation. Any fewer, and the topic is deemed a dud. What threatens to sink any given round of Punslingers into chaos is that an infinite supply of words could be considered ‘commonly associated’ with other words by the transitive property. These meetings are meant to predetermine just how far down the rabbit hole the organizers are willing to let players go. Apparently, the O. Henry is always just a hairsbreadth away from descending into a grotty swamp of nonregulation puns.
Brian rips open his satchel, at which point I see that he has fresh scars on his hand, and pulls out an older list of O. Henry topics that have passed muster. Then he begins verbally removing the veil of Maya that shrouds this mysterious process.
“So, we write ‘Blades’ on an index card and the first thing we do is ask: Are we gonna take all the parts of a blade? Are we gonna reward people for knowing the difference between a tang and a hilt? Yeah, we’re gonna reward that. And we’ll also take the names Bubba and Gerber and Old Timer.”
Brian seems to know more about knives than any person I have ever met. Before I can respond in any way, he continues.
“But then, do we take all the verbs you can do with a knife—slice, dice, cut? Maybe. Then you get to cooking—paring knife, butcher knife, machete—and that’s when it gets complicated.”
“We won’t take machete,” David cuts in, pronouncing it excrementally. “This is a family-friendly event.”
“Hell, I won’t take machete off anybody,” Brian says.
“He’s not whittling Dixie,” Gary adds, polishing the prescription glasses that hang from a cord around his neck.
I’m starting to see why Gary warned me about getting him and the other two Marx Brothers in a room together, but it is too late. I bought the ticket, and I’m taking the ride.
“Do we take razor? Yes, we do,” Brian says, arms crossed on the table like an edgy sociology professor sitting backward in a chair, possibly about to use the word sheeple. “But if you’re taking razor, you gotta take Gillette.”
“And if you take Jillette,” David says, grinning. “You gotta take Penn.”
“And then you’re taking Schick from everybody.”
I look closely at the list that has blades on it, mainly so I don’t have to look Brian in the face during an aggressive display of knife knowledge. Every topic on the list is placed next to the year it was last used and which round it landed in. Some of these topics represent pet projects the committee dreamed up, nurtured, and set free in the wild. These topics are their babies. They watch them either flourish or fail, and then they review the tapes like football coaches.
Some rounds that didn’t go well still haunt them. Brian had high hopes for Fictional Creatures, for instance. He imagined a world of crossover monster fights: Yeti puns against Bigfoot puns, with Dracula and Godzilla tussling not far behind. It did not go that way at all. The contestants argued all fictional characters are technically fictional creatures. Frasier Crane is a fictional creature. Ditto the cast of the Fast and Furious octilogy. And even when the punsters stayed on track, there were other problems. After someone made a pun about witches, people in the audience complained that witches are real, citing a wealth of affable Wiccans.
“They had a problem with that one,” Brian says. “Yet they roar at pedophilia puns.”
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how involved a process they’ve made this into. It should be so much easier. It certainly is at Punderdome. I search my brain for a potential new topic and come up with one instantly.
“What about, like, Explorers?”
Everyone’s faces stretch and constrict with consideration. Over Gary’s shoulder, a sandpiper lands inside a terra-cotta birdbath. David digs into the tortilla chips and queso that have just arrived, a faraway look in his eyes.
“Well,” Brian says, diplomatically, making a little fort with his fingers, “we’d be willing to accept Meriwether, and Lewis and Clark, and Louisiana Purchase, and—”
“I bought a stainless steel sports car on eBay,” David cuts in, waggling his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “I had to pounce de leon.”
I have no idea what this means.
“There could be something here,” Gary says. “It’s not just names of explorers, it’s also the Pinta, Niña, and Santa Maria.”
“And it’s the best we could afford,” David says. When nobody reacts to his pun for the second time in a row, he clarifies: “Ford Explorer.”
“All right, but let me ask you a question,” Brian says as I reach for a tortilla, his eyes narrowed into pizza dough perforations. “Is your arm strong enough to lift that chip?”
I drop the chip as though I’ve been caught shoplifting and it submerges into queso like quicksand.
“Neil Armstrong,” Brian continues. “You’re telling me he wasn’t an explorer? You son of a bitch. He was an American hero. You’re not gonna take him?”
His deadpan is chillingly convincing. I know Brian’s not actually being hostile right now, but I only kind of know that and also he is not smiling one iota.
“Well, I guess—”
“Oh, you are gonna take him? Are you gonna take every astronaut? Or are you gonna decide, on your own stinking set of values, who’s an explorer in the astronaut program?”
“And then there’s fictional explorers,” Gary points out.
“Dora the Explorer.”
“Microsoft Internet,” Brian says. “Explorer? You make the call.”
His pointy finger is now two inches away from my sternum. At the next table over, a guy with Navajo braids and John Lennon sunglasses is staring at me while vaping.
“Yeah, that’s a tough one,” I concede.
The guiding principle here seems to be that the contestants are all high-level pun hackers, out to exploit any weakness the planning committee might have left exposed. My hosts are like grizzled war veterans who return from combat and trust nobody back in civilian life, every garbage can a potential IED. Books and Authors isn’t possible because the punsters could just make up the name of any author—and even if they didn’t, it’s “too broad.” Perhaps there’s a category so broad it would never run out, at which point we’d all give up and make a new life of it in the backyard behind O. Henry’s old house.
“Couldn’t you just steer them the right way when they get too granular?” I ask.
“We do that,” Gary says. “It just gets tricky sometimes. But they wouldn’t have this problem at Punderdome, because there’s a finite amount of time to come up with stuff and present it and they can only go on for so long.”
I want to remind them that they are, in fact, the organizing committee and that they definitely have the power to enforce any arbitrary time limit they want, and maybe let the audience decide the winner with a clap-off. I get the feeling, though, that asking why they don’t make the O. Henry more like Punderdome would freeze this table into an icy tundra.
Just as I’m spiraling, Brian starts laughing like a loon and bolts out of his chair. Two women with matching side mullets and Day-Glo sunglasses look at us. The source of laughter quickly becomes clear. David has a gelatinous dollop of queso on his forehead and he is unaware of it. He remains unaware of it even after Brian takes a picture with his phone and shows it to him, right up until Brian points a finger directly at the splash of cheese sauce on David’s forehead in the photo.
“Okay, let’s talk through a topic I’ve been wanting to bring up,” David says, abruptly changing the subject a
s he wipes down his reddening face. “What about Detectives?”
“I like the appeal of it,” Brian says. “But I think it’s too hard to police because it encompasses movies, books, and TV shows, and the actors who play all those roles.”
“You said ‘police,’” I point out, but David talks right over me.
“I didn’t ask you how you would shoot it down,” he spits back. “Let’s discuss it.”
“I’m not shooting it down, but it might be too difficult to enforce.”
“But couldn’t we say that about anything? About chemistry?”
“A book about chemistry doesn’t grow weekly with more popular culture being expanded,” Brian says, on a roll. “I could do a quick Google and come up with a hundred detectives you’ve never heard of—you can’t come up with a hundred elements nobody knows.”
“But saying ‘there’s too many’ can apply to any topic.”
Brian’s entire head becomes the kind of Herculean eye roll glimpsed in many a reaction gif.
“Okay: Detectives,” he says, scrunching up his lips. “So we take the names of detectives, obviously. Is Jethro Gibbs of CSI a detective? He’s an investigator for the military.”
Somehow, I remember that Jethro Gibbs is Mark Harmon’s character on NCIS, not CSI, but I would rather stick my head in a microwave than point that out right now.
“I would take it because it’s slower to not take it,” David says.
“So already we’re taking something because it’s a hassle not to? And speaking of hassle, is Knight Rider David Hasselhoff a detective? Hey, I happen to be friends with a detective, does he count?”
“We could also just do Names of Detectives,” David says, crossing his arms.
“We’re not taking the names of the movies?”
“Only if the character is in the name of the movie.”
A royal flush smile spreads across Brian’s face.
“So let me get this right. This is the category,” Brian says and lets it breathe for a moment. “Names of Detectives, Also Movies, But Only If in Title. That’s a winner right there. I wanna sit with a beer and watch that one play out.”
“All right, fine! No Detectives!” David says, bolting out of his seat. I now have no problem at all visualizing the pun scrimmages these two must have had back in the day.
Gary catches the dizzy, demoralized look on my face from across the table and raises an eyebrow.
“We sure know how to suck the fun out of puns, don’t we?”
By the time I leave Spider House, my head is spinning. Not only am I seeing pun possibilities in every printed word I pass, which has been my brain’s modus operandi lately, I’m also zooming out and grouping words in categories and debating whether they’d fly as O. Henry topics. I just want to go to a meadow somewhere for a while and decompress, maybe think about clouds and how fluffy they are. If being around nonstop puns for a couple hours has this effect on me, what’s it going to be like soaking inside of them for an entire day, and competing against people who thrive in such harsh conversational climates? I had to admit, though, as weird and intense as things had just gotten, it hadn’t been boring.
On the way back to my friend’s apartment, near the chrome chicken trailer and the wax castle, I see dozens of people gathered on the bridge commonly known as Bat Bridge. This time, I do ask what’s happening. It turns out people come here every day, often around dusk, because that’s when an entire galaxy of bats swarm out from beneath the bridge and paint the sky with their collective mass. Amazingly, these things that are so horrifying individually somehow shed their hideousness as they increase in number and transform into sheer spectacle.
One of something awful is just awful, but thousands of something awful is something you just have to see. In its own Austin-weird way, it’s beautiful.
4
Spitting the Lotto Ticket
During a break in December’s Punderdome, Words Nightmare looks up from her phone and catches me snooping. I pretend to be mesmerized by the DJ booth over her shoulder—What song will he play next?!—and that I’m definitely not checking out whether her fervent thumb-flicks are footprints on a Tinder-sprint.
When I stop pretending and look back, her dark eyebrows are raised expectantly, pushing up her uneven fringe. Words Nightmare, a former ergonomic engineer turned freelance writer, whose real name is Ally Spier, has busted me. The crowd noise around us seems to fizzle as I sink into low-grade shame.
“Are you wondering if there are any good matches in this room?” she asks, finally.
“Yes, very much,” I say.
Although I first saw Ally at the New York Post Punderdome a few months ago, where she enchanted the crowd and tied with Jerzy for the win, I’ve only met her once since then, for coffee. It seems a little early in our knowing each other to talk best practices for geolocational dating apps. Perhaps there’s something about seeing someone at their most vulnerable, though—in a freestyle pun juggle—that facilitates level jumping.
“No good matches tonight,” she announces. “Usually guys message me later, ‘Did I see you at Punderdome?’ And I prefer that because then it’s like we could’ve conceivably met here, but without the awkwardness of actually meeting here.”
Ally has big black glasses like a 1950s waitress, and a thrift store raider’s fashion sense, with unpredictable combinations of layers. She talks fast and makes jokes so deadpan-chipper, you don’t realize a joke has been made until a moment later. One of Ally’s Tinder profile photos depicts her onstage, smiling just after landing a killer pun, the crowd receiving it like a Southern Baptist church choir. A lot of suitors comment on the picture, using it as an excuse to reach out. Punderdome isn’t just a catalyst in her love life, though, it’s also a barometer.
“Because Punderdome is something that’s become a part of my life in a couple different ways, I will now introduce it as this thing—‘Here’s something I do, you’re obviously invited’—and nobody has objected,” she says. “But if anyone ever did object, I’d say we’re done, right now. That’s it.”
Punning must be among the world’s least likely aphrodisiacs, somewhere between oysters and the parking lot of any Dunkin’ Donuts, but it is. I’ve seen it happen. Later that night, a young woman with blue hair approaches Jerzy, making unmistakable sexy eyes. “You’re literally amazing,” she tells him, and then walks away. I’m not sure whether she means “literally” as a meta-pun or not.
Once she’s gone, I give Jerzy a very serious look and ask point-blank: “Are there pun groupies?”
“Kind of, yeah,” he says, shrugging. “That’s why they call it Punder-do me.”
At any given Punderdome, a player who does well might get complimented or outright hit on once or twice, usually during the break or after the show ends. It’s happened to Tim. It’s happened to Isaac. It’s happened to pretty much all the women of Punderdome. One night, the Littlefield DJ passed Jerzy a note from a mystery woman, simply stating “you make me corny.” People who are into puns are apparently way into them.
“It’s not just that there’s potential sex to be had,” Jerzy says. “It’s cool because ordinarily if you’re the person making a pun in a room, you’re probably always that guy or that girl. But at a pun competition, it’s a room full of that guy and that girl. So basically, while a pun can waylay a conversation, if you’re with a bunch of people who also make puns, it can get you way laid.”
There is no way he invented that line just for my benefit.
Eventually, the competition builds to a final round between Ally and a guy who goes by Daft Pun. He’s thin, wolfishly handsome, and he looks like the star of every student film ever submitted in good faith to a major film festival. I’ve seen Daft Pun before, back at the New York Post event, though at the time he had on a tinfoil hat like an alien truther, and he was part of a duo. His name is Nikolai Vanyo, he’s a music video and film director a few years out of college, and he is close with Ally. Tonight, the two friends engage in
a fast-paced pun-off and when Nikolai wins, it’s his first time doing so without his teammate. Ally takes the defeat with grace, clapping for Nikolai as he steps forward, arms out, to embrace the crowd’s love.
Punderdome is officially over for the year.
We’ve now reached the pun solstice, the verbal equinox. The O. Henry Pun-Off is six months away, a comfortably far-off X in next year’s calendar. That’s five more Punderdomes for anyone who plans on heading to Austin in the spring. My performance at the December Dome was an improvement so marginal it would take nanotechnology to track it, but if I keep going back, I’m bound to get better. There’s just one problem. Fred Firestone gets frostbite even thinking about New York in the winter, so he stays home in St. Louis each January and February, during which time there is no Punderdome. Tumbleweeds will be scraping across the cold ground of the northern metropolitan pun community for months. The circus has left town.
Competitive wordplay doesn’t evaporate in the off-season, though. Just because the Olympics aren’t returning for three years, the athletes don’t automatically abandon their draconian workouts to binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There had to be options for practicing beyond just jamming puns into any conversational crevice they almost fit. I was going to find them.
Picture someone practicing for a pun competition. It’s the saddest Rocky training montage of all, isn’t it? In my case, the image entails a man firmly in his midthirties, sitting alone in his bedroom with the door shut, making puns about colors. (“Is having the blues what made Matthew Perry wrinkle?”) The thought of my dead relatives and pets looking down from another plane of existence as I do this is mortifying.
I start off with an overly generous five-minute limit. It’s just a warm-up, something to get my brain used to rattling off puns in a hurry until I can do it instantaneously. Speed is key. Speed is the killer app of pun competitions. You have to be bullet-quick. Not just quick in the way of a devastating comeback when someone insults you—say, for devoting too much time to pun calisthenics—but so quick you already have another pun lined up right away and one after that. Punning is like chess that way: it gets tougher with a time constraint, you’ve got to think far ahead, and nobody looks cool doing it. When you receive the topic, Colors, you peruse the Pantone catalog in your brain, pull powder blue, think “I had some cocaine but my powder blew away,” and on to the next, tout de suite.
Away with Words Page 6