Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  “That’s so old. You can’t just do that one over and over,” Jordan says. “‘Guitar asses in gear?’ It’s been used and used. We said we were gonna start calling each other out on this stuff.”

  The more puns that cross the transom of your brainpan, the more you have stockpiled, forever on deck. They become like those canned anecdotes we all have, spring-loaded and ready to go whenever someone mentions anything related to a certain topic. If you spend time trying to remember your favorite puns while the clock is ticking at Punderdome, rather than make up new ones, it will backfire, but some old standards just become part of your vocabulary. Hear these pun-hacks enough, though, and they lodge in your ear like hocked loogies.

  “Are we gonna start keeping track of everything we say?” Jerzy says.

  “I’m just saying, if guitar is used one more time, you’re fired from the podcast.”

  The next game we play is every bit as complicated as 99 Somethings, only it’s a play on the creaky Yiddish joke about finding a fly in one’s soup. The brothers have christened this game with the singularly reprehensible pun, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Broth-er.

  “Waiter, there are boots in my soup,” Jordan says.

  “Why don’t I call the sous chef over—heel deal with it,” Jerzy shoots back.

  We spend a long stretch finding shoes and then cars in a supernaturally large bowl of soup. For some reason, probably having to do with tetrahydrocannabinol, I continue making car puns long after we move on. I spend multiple turns in a row trying in earnest to fashion a joke around Ford Lincoln Mercury—“I can’t af-ford leek in, more curry”—but it is just not happening. When I listen back later on, I pray that I stay quiet for a bit afterward. I do not. Instead, I keep steering back to my apparent favorite subject: The automobile industry.

  “Are you from Detroit?” Max asks.

  This is the second way puns can be objectively Bad: timing. You could come up with the greatest wordplay in the world, but if it’s a pun about what everybody was talking about five minutes ago, it’s too late. The world has moved on. A late pun makes everybody who witnessed its birth imagine the effort expended on it—which feels about as uncomfortably intimate as seeing your friend’s parents at the moment of conception. The timing rule also applies to situational appropriateness, which is why historically very few puns are made at funerals.

  Suddenly, I can’t shake the feeling that everybody here fucking hates me. It seems irrational, but is it? When Jordan announces that there’s a musical instrument in his soup, Sam responds, “I think Joe left it there, we’d better ban-Joe,” which feels like a personal attack.

  “I guess we’ll have to guitar selves more soup, motherfucker!” Jerzy says, looking Jordan dead in the eye.

  Everybody laughs and I realize through the cloak of resin coating my thoughts that nobody is thinking about me. They’re thinking of puns.

  The final game of the night is the same as the first, Bro Pun Says We, except this time with Women’s Names instead of Mammals. Jordan passes out paper and we all take a couple minutes to write down puns. As we do so, Trevor lightly strums a ukulele and sings. His voice is actually breathtaking.

  “I’m gonna kick this off with a philosophical question about The Lion King,” Jordan says. “Did Scar-let Mufasa die?”

  Instead of yelling in the general direction of the microphone stand, as we did before, now we’re passing the mic around. After each person speaks into it, there’s always a couple hands waggling to get it next, with the most insistent ones winning.

  “When I do an ab workout,” Sam starts, her hands on her midsection, “I make sure to hold my core-in.”

  “I used to wear an S, and then an M, but now I rock L,” I say.

  “Hey, wanna go to the bar, brah?” Jerzy says.

  Even though I just went, my hand starts shaking like a grand mal seizure, and Jerzy passes the mic back to me.

  “I heard the bar was kind of full, we may have to jostle in,” I say, and it hits like a battle rap diss, with cascading applause.

  This is the closest I’ve gotten to the back and forth of the final round at Punderdome. Although I started with a handful of ideas written down, those went quickly, and I was happily surprised by how many more kept coming to me.

  “I don’t like when people successfully prevail because of bullshit,” Sam says. “Nobody should win-on-a technicality.”

  “I got kind of high on the way to deliver gifts to the magi,” I say, “and I brought frankincense, myrrh and, uh . . . I don’t know what else.”

  We then proceed to do the remaining Sex and the City character names and call it a night. It’s 1:30 in the morning. We have been punning for over four hours.

  I leave the basement loft no longer high, but giddy from the group rush of linguistic discovery. We’d chased our categories as far as they could go, mostly free from the time restrictions of competition. There could be no better way to start training in the off-season.

  Now that I’d paid way too much attention to what was happening in my head while punning, though, I was curious to find out what was going on in everybody else’s.

  Second Round

  5

  The Punning Linguists

  There cannot be enough humor research conferences in the world to require the specificity of a North East Texas Humor Research Conference. As far as I can tell, when entering coordinates into Google Maps, “North East Texas” isn’t even a real place. In fact, exactly as few such conferences exist as one might expect. The name turns out to be the organizers’ idea of a humor-joke. Wocka-wocka.

  What I quickly learn upon arriving is that a humor research conference is among Earth’s least funny places. If trying to explain a joke is like dissecting a frog, as E. B. White said, being here is like walking through an endless M. C. Escher house drenched in frog entrails.

  I’ve come here in the name of science, in order to find out more about the mental artillery factory responsible for making puns before Punderdome returns in March. I want to know whether an instinct for instant wordplay comes down to nature, nurture, or neither, and whether the study of humor reveals anything about punning. My search for a linguist who could speak to this topic leads me to Dr. Salvatore Attardo, dean of humanities at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Dr. Attardo not only agreed to discuss puns with me, he extended an invitation to attend this conference, where I could also interview his colleague Dr. Christian Hempelmann, one of the world’s foremost pun experts, and tour the university’s humor lab. No way would I ever turn down an offer to see a humor lab. For all I knew, it involved a forensic analysis of airplane food, the sexual audit of a man from Nantucket, people of different races noting their differences while using a triple-beam balance as a seesaw, and lab-coated technicians showing dank memes to a monkey.

  The next thing I knew, I was driving a rented Ford Focus down I-30 East and listening to the new Kanye West, which, incidentally, is loaded with puns.

  “I’m drivin’ with no winter tires in December

  Skrrt skrrt skrrt like a private school for women”

  The grass along the highway looks bleached of color, as though any trace of green has been sucked out through a giant subterranean straw. It isn’t exactly farm country, but several houses I pass have little red barns next to them like sidecars. Mexican restaurants dot the main streets, occasionally accented with neon sombreros, and the last one I make out before arriving at my hotel is called TaMolly’s. (Whomever the “Molly” refers to in this pun, I hope she’s happy with her choices). It’s an omen. I’ve either come to the right place or it’s just that once you start noticing puns, you realize they’re inescapable.

  The university campus is sprawling and the map I pull up on my phone has an intricate number system for buildings and parking lots. Eventually, after much anxious power walking, I arrive where I’m supposed to be: the Department of Industrial Engineering and Technology. It seems like the wrong place to hear deeply researched theories from leading pun
experts, but the conference had to happen somewhere.

  The lobby where the reception mixer is held has particleboard ceilings, patchy carpeting that looks like it itches, long couches the precise color of tongue, and artwork like blurry stills from a laser light show. The assistant who registers me also hands over a name tag on a lanyard, along with an itinerary, and a T-shirt commemorating the day. The logo on the itinerary is an armadillo on its back, whose body spells out the initials of the conference. I thought an armadillo on its back was an unambiguous symbol of death, with backwater bozos occasionally known to place a beer in the deceased’s claws, but this one appears to be laughing hysterically. Is this another sign?

  There’s a buffet of warmed-over spring rolls and crab cakes in chafing dishes, resting on a table draped in the school’s colors, blue and gold. A group that is diverse in gender, ethnicity, and amount of snow on the rooftop is arranged around it, in varying degrees of casual; mostly dresses and black leggings for the women, and button-downs tucked into jeans for the men. I load up on spring rolls, perch on a tongue-couch, and peruse the itinerary while working up to a state of mingle-readiness.

  There’s a man with a prodigious gut poking out of a gray suit who appears to pull every crab-cake-gripping attendee into his orbit. Even without seeing his name tag, I sense that this is Dr. Attardo. He has a high forehead with slightly mussed graying hair, and his manner is very serious for someone chairing a humor conference. When I make my way over and introduce myself, Dr. Attardo cordially thanks me for coming, in a glottal accent I peg as possibly Belgian. His demeanor does not soften at all, though, from putting a face to an e-mail correspondence. Perhaps he’s like Jerzy and needs to get in his zone before addressing the crowd.

  Soon, Dr. Attardo summons over his colleague, Dr. Hempelmann, so we can iron out our itinerary for the next day. The world-class pun expert, some of whose papers I’ve read to prepare for this trip, receives me in a slightly warmer manner.

  “I hate you for making me wake up at eight thirty on a Saturday,” he says.

  Dr. Hempelmann has a ruddy complexion, a mild Swedish mullet, and an eccentrically collared deep-blue shirt like a jaunty Bond villain. I have no idea what to say to make an adult feel better about waking up semiearly to talk to me, so instead I mention how excited I am to see the humor lab.

  “‘Lab’ is a bit of an overstatement,” he says, and a photographer walking around captures the exact moment I realize just how long this weekend is going to be.

  After we confirm the time for tomorrow’s sleep-disrupting interview, and which assistant will conduct me around the lab, the conference officially commences. Everybody shuffles into a clown-car-tiny classroom. It is very hot. A series of framed posters on the wall touts the benefits of coffee and most are rather cloying, like “Coffee Tastes Best with a Friend,” but then there’s one that reads “Coffee Makes You Gay,” which during the roughly 867 hours I spend in this classroom over the next two days, nobody appears to notice or react to, making me wonder whether this is, itself, some kind of humor research experiment. After everyone is seated, Dr. Attardo pads over to a podium with a plaque that reads department of industrial engineering and technology, but some of the letters in the first word are faded, so it actually reads die art men. As everyone’s conversations finally fizzle, he addresses the crowd.

  “Sorry that we’ve had to relocate onto campus this year, but the reason we’re doing this is simple: I do not look good in a cheerleader outfit.”

  Everybody laughs and because we are at a humor research conference, I can’t help but analyze what has just happened. I think about how Attardo’s somber bearing makes it register harder when he says something intended to be funny, apart from just the mental image of him in a cheerleader outfit. I think about the mechanism by which we are all exhaling rapidly through our bronchial passages to communicate that we are amused. I wonder whether anyone else here is analyzing what it means that we are laughing—perhaps including it in a running tally—and whether they do this all the time, the sound of guffaws triggering abstract calculations.

  The dean follows up with a “But seriously” and then explains that a cheerleading competition booked up the hotel they usually hold the conference in, hence why we are here instead, in this small classroom together.

  Once the keynote is finished and the first presentations begin, the cheerleader joke ends up being the last laugh I experience for some time. Each successive presentation, spoken in near-impenetrable academese, is an attempt to prove things everybody already knows and nobody really cares about. There’s the one whose thesis is that irony is not inherently funny, especially to young children, and there’s another that makes a cohesive scientific argument that The Onion’s headlines are, in fact, awesome. The latter presenter, a Ph.D. student in applied linguistics, uses a laser pointer to highlight some entries from his corpus of Onion headlines, even though the projection screen is less than a foot away. This corpus is only the first of the weekend’s many, many corpuses—or as another presenter calls them, corpora. All of them seem statistically insignificant, though, especially the corpus of stand-up comedy one guy made out of transcripts from fifteen comedy albums—the only ones he professed to be able to find. (Fact: At least fifteen comedy albums came out last month, whatever month you’re reading this.) I don’t know much about professional humor research, but I do know that fifteen albums do not a corpus make.

  Each presentation is twenty-five minutes long, with five minutes reserved for questions afterward. When the speaker has five minutes left, a woman up front helpfully holds up signs that read “5,” then eventually “1,” and finally “Stop!” Whenever the last one is flashed, it reminds me of when stand-up comics get the red light and have to wrap up their set. I keep waiting for a presenter to say “That’s my time” and go hit on people at the bar, in true stand-up comedian fashion.

  During the questions portion, the same guy always kicks the tires on everybody’s presentation with questions that more than once begin, “I’m just gonna play devil’s advocate here . . .” His name is Carey, he’s skinny and bald, with squirrelly eyes, and his vibe could best be described as several concurrent cocaine epiphanies. I keep thinking he had better have something amazing when it’s his turn, the way he keeps poking holes in everyone else’s presentations. Tomorrow, he will be the one who put together the corpus of stand-up comedy. Until then, there are many more presentations to get through, and their net effect is that it begins to feel as though humor has not only been inspected and autopsied but fully eradicated, as though we’re studying a relic from some long-dead civilization. Was I, or anyone I’ve known, ever actually funny? Was anything?

  Freshly showered and continentally breakfasted, I arrive on campus the next morning for the designated pre–9:00 a.m. pun chat—the whole reason I’ve come to Dallas. The conference surrounding it is starting to feel like a slow-motion car wreck that turns me into rhetorical roadkill, another armadillo. The experience has only made the inner workings of puns feel more unknowable. I’m now desperate to learn anything.

  Attardo is on the phone in the administrative office, so I go to the pantry and pour myself a cup of orange-tinted coffee from a prehistoric hotplate. By the time I return to the lobby, Dr. Hempelmann has materialized, wearing the same shirt with the same strange collar as the previous day, and looking slightly more rumpled and red-faced. My time with the world-class pun expert is already dwindling, so I start the interview while Attardo is out of the room.

  “Is there anything in people’s upbringing that might make them good at puns?” I ask Dr. Hempelmann, who is now plunked down on a couch, rubbing his temples.

  All the champions I’ve met over the past few months seem to have had overlapping formative experiences that foreshadowed their pun proficiency.

  Jerzy and Jordan grew up playing Scrabble with three generations of punsters in their family.

  Ben Ziek devoured crossword puzzles and riddle books as a child, when he wasn’t
watching game shows.

  Ariel was the eleventh-best speller in California when she was in middle school, and she carried Bananagrams with her everywhere she went.

  Isaac was another spelling bee kingpin, and so were Tim and Ally. Tim was also addicted to the word game Balderdash, but he got bored with the prompts on the cards eventually and started writing his own.

  Ally and Sam were both Daily Jumble junkies.

  Almost everybody played word games on long car trips, which I am retroactively jealous of, having grown up in more of a Punch Buggy Blue household. The high incidence rate of Boggle too could not be a coincidence. There had to be a linguistic explanation for what all the champions have in common.

  “Maybe their mental lexicon is structured the wrong way?” Dr. Hempelmann says after a while. “Their semantic associations aren’t so much semantic but more phonological. Normal people, they hear a word and it’s all about the meaning—the sound is completely secondary, it’s just a gateway to the meaning. But people who are punsters are constantly tickled by the sound of language. And you should only work with the meaning of language instead, since that’s what it’s there for.”

  There is a chance that one of the world’s experts on puns actually hates puns.

  All I want to know is if there are common characteristics in a punster’s upbringing beyond what I’ve already gathered, and here we’ve arrived at punning as mental disorder. This sort of thinking has been in vogue lately. The past year has seen an onslaught of news stories about a punning disease called witzelsucht, which is German for “addiction to wisecracking.” Patients usually present with witzelsucht after having a stroke or incurring other forms of brain damage, leading some critics to conflate all compulsive punning with evidence of a damaged brain. This idea has not exactly had the pun community dancing in the streets.