Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  The game is called Cobragator, a tribute to the Roger Corman movies on Syfy that pair two unlikely killer creatures with the most indifferently produced special effects money can buy. The comics have to come up with as many hybrid monsters of their own as they can in sixty seconds.

  “AntelOprah,” Randy offers.

  “Dracullama,” Paul says, with a silent film eyebrow-raise.

  “Scott Baio-wolf,” Jen calls out, looking embarrassed. Paul cracks up, but it’s difficult to tell whether it’s because of what she said or how she said it.

  Jen is soon dismissed from the show, ahead of the game-ending For the Win challenge, which is always between the two finalists. There’s a moment afterward, when she’s still standing at her podium, bathed in awkward red dismissal light, crossing her arms and closing her eyes in a mummy pose. Paul then wins the challenge, which is decided, Punderdome style, by audience applause.

  The taping goes so smoothly, you can see why it’s almost the 400th episode. Now that it’s over, though, I go backstage to see if I can get these comedians to talk about puns.

  The green room at the studio is actually powder blue, with a wet bar that has thin neon piping throughout. There’s water, wine, soda, and Red Bull in compact refrigerators, along with all kinds of breads and cheeses in birdcage-size cheese domes. A PR rep for the show narrates his decision to eat carbs and then chastises himself for it. Paul has loosened his tie now, and up close, I can see he’s wearing a lapel button adorned with the logo of his podcast, Spontaneanation. (All three have podcasts, naturally. It’s never a question of “Does this comedian have a podcast?” but “How many?”)

  Once everybody arranges themselves across the couches, I ask how being a stand-up helps with thinking of funny things in the moment.

  “The longer you’ve had experience being onstage, the more you can do ten things at once with your mind,” Jen says. “Not make a stupid face on camera, think of your next joke, come up with a tag for the joke, and quickly recover if it doesn’t go well.”

  I can do maybe two things onstage at a time; one of them is “not fall off it,” and even that’s no sure bet.

  “It also helps if you’re able to write onstage,” Paul says. “In my earliest days, I think I was able to project a confidence that I did not necessarily have, so that bought me time to think, but as I’ve gotten genuinely more comfortable onstage over the years, I’m better in the moment at coming up with things.”

  “That’s how I write all the time,” Jen says. “I’ll have a rough skeleton of what I want to say and then the pressure of being out there motivates me and makes me feel confident to say stuff. I’m less confident writing something and then going onstage with that attitude of ‘I think this is funny!’ I’d rather just go for it and let it come out naturally.”

  The pressure of being “out there” has apparently had a different effect on me so far than it has had on Jen Kirkman. Mainly it’s made me second-guess every potential pun as really dumb and scurry away from the microphone like it’s on fire. At the same time, though, I’ve seen people like Jerzy and Isaac perform some okay-at-best puns with a sterling conviction that earns them the room on a platter.

  “Does a joke ever pop in your head on @Midnight, and you don’t really think it’s good but it’s your turn so you just deliver the shit out of it?” I ask.

  “There might be a thing that you don’t really have time to think twice about,” Paul says, reclining in his seat. “And you’ve just gotta be, like, ‘I’m gonna sell this like it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said.’”

  “Or you don’t sell it,” Randy says. “You sell it as horrible and then that gets a laugh.”

  “Sometimes selling a really bad joke you just made up, if it’s bad enough and you let on you know that it’s bad, is better than landing a well-written joke,” Jen says.

  One of the most striking things about Punderdome is how earnest it is. Nearly everyone goes there because they unabashedly enjoy puns. Punning ironically there is like crying in a monsoon. In other situations, people use puns as arch antijokes to make someone laugh at how unfunny what they’re saying is. Comedy writers, especially. Seasoned comedians hear so many jokes, sometimes the only way to make them laugh is with how intensely unfunny something is—say, a pun. But those same puns would be received sincerely at Punderdome or the O. Henry, getting laughs for a different reason. Which brings me to the fourth kind of Bad Pun: the Look Ma No Hands. This one comes down to intention, and the way you sell it.

  When Mitt Romney was vying for the presidency in 2011, he suggested during a campaign stop at a diner that the cook should serve eggs Benedict on hubcaps because—and this is indeed a quote—“There’s no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.” Nearly fifty-seven million people still voted for him, but I like to think the joke had some kind of impact at the polls. Whoever gave Romney that pun to use had awkwardly stuffed three breakfast puns into a verbal turducken, which he deployed in hopes of coming across as folksy. It did not work.

  On the other end of the spectrum, the late, brilliant comedy writer Harris Wittels once put three breakfast puns together hilariously. During a visit to the podcast Comedy Bang Bang, Wittels said with zero affect, “I wanna open a Jamaican/Irish/Spanish small plate breakfast restaurant and call it Tapas the Morning to Jah.” Immediately afterward, another guest on the show, the musician Annie Clark, let out a groan as if she’d been gut-punched. It’s a complimentary groan, somehow. Wittels’s pun is just as much of a stretch as Romney’s, but in some indefinable way, it’s clear he knows that. The lack of agenda is why his joke is bracing anticomedy while Romney’s is just a bad pun that appears to be the source of much unearned pride.

  “So you can sell a bad joke, but what about a pun?” I ask the group. “Do you ever make puns in general?”

  “If I did puns in my stand-up, I think it would just come off kinda corny and dishonest and ‘who cares,’ but it’s a fun thing to do,” Jen says. “It’s not necessarily always appropriate for the public, but on @Midnight it works well because you’re doing it so fast.”

  Paul and Randy both nod vigorously.

  “I’m not a huge fan of puns just for the sake of puns,” Paul says. “To me, a pun is: These two things sound alike, that’s the end of the humor. What I do like is wordplay, and I think that although there are a lot of puns on this show, there are also a lot of turns of phrase and it’s the way words are put together and to me that’s something else.”

  With perhaps a touch of Romney-like pride, I explain how varied the turns of phrase are at Punderdome—that all these spontaneous puns are either couched in classic joke structure or linked together in a story. Nobody can even pretend this sounds like a place they’d like to visit. The room stays silent for a moment before Jen speaks up.

  “Everybody makes fun of Sex and the City for having a lot of puns,” she says, “and I think of this one scene everybody talks about in the second movie, when Samantha goes ‘Lawrence of My Labia.’”

  Everybody nods with recognition. This line got singled out and excoriated by critics when the film was released. When I eventually speak to Greg Behrendt, a stand-up comedian who consulted on Sex and the City and coined the phrase “He’s just not that into you,” he confirms that the puns were his absolute least favorite part of the show by far.

  “That line had to go through so many drafts of a script, rehearsals, it had so many moments to be killed,” Jen continues, “but people decided: ‘This is funny, and not ironically.’”

  Paul and Randy both laugh a little.

  “If I said Lawrence of My Labia on @Midnight, though, it would be funny,” Jen says. “Because you’d be, like, ‘She thought of that in two seconds and she knows she’s being silly.’ It wasn’t like a writer who gets paid a lot of money wrote that for a character and was, like, ‘Let’s make sure Lawrence of My Labia gets all the way to filming.’”

  “And if you do any pun as Johnny Carson, I think that works, too,” Randy
says. When he tries out Lawrence of My Labia with a dead-on Johnny Carson, everybody laughs.

  “I would’ve loved that movie so much if Samantha busted out a Carson,” Paul says.

  “After all these years,” Jen adds, “Samantha’s finally comfortable in her own skin as a woman. ‘Girls, now that I’m fifty-five and I’ve hit menopause, I wanna show you another side of myself.

  ‘I do impressions of men.’”

  “Who’d be the Ed McMahon of Sex and the City?” Jen asks.

  Everybody says “Charlotte” at the exact same moment, which ironically seems like the button on a scene in an episode of Sex and the City. Then they all continue to do what comics do and riff Sex and the City jokes for a couple more minutes.

  Registry for the O. Henry Pun-Off will be open soon, with the competition itself just over a month away. Punsters across the nation are preparing themselves to do battle in Austin, and the digital duel of @Midnight is a decent way to start practicing.

  As incentive to play along, the show’s social media producer singles out an exceptional tweet each night and flashes it across the screen during the episode. The gravitational pull of @Midnight bragging rights is strong enough to lure almost every self-respecting punster into its orbit, beyond just those who are training to compete. Neither the practice-averse Punky Brewster nor the overachieving Ben Ziek can resist the show’s siren song. Ask any Domer or O. Henry affiliate under thirty-five and they’ve likely tried to get their tweet featured on @Midnight.

  Taking the time to craft #SuckyActionMovie puns can’t really prepare anyone for the speed volleying at O. Henry or in the final round of Punderdome, though. The best way to do that is with a flesh-and-blood human person, preferably one who doesn’t hate puns. Tim used to practice on the roof of his apartment with his friend Black Punther. They would smoke a joint, come up with topics, and go back and forth, flexing the lexicon. The goal was to keep up the rhythm of a natural conversation, so that crafting a punny response felt as natural as talking. This technique might not have unearthed the greatest puns ever—they are lost to the ages now—but because of the impairment, the two felt like hilarious geniuses, and both did well at subsequent Punderdomes. When hanging out was inconvenient, the two would text puns back and forth—and since hanging out is always inconvenient now that Black Punther has moved to Cincinnati, they still do have textual pun-offs sometimes.

  Ally practices this way, too, minus the marijuana. Usually, though, it’s by accident. Conversations with friends will just lapse into punspeak until a topic is completely drained of puns. Sometimes it happens in person and sometimes over text. When two pun champions are friends, like Ally is with Nikolai, any digital exchange on any topic can go straight off the rails and turn into this:

  [tbh I like this weather]

  [Perfect for tea drinking, of course you do]

  [And for going to the post office to pick up a rain jacket. O the irony]

  [I-rainy]

  [Spoken like a raining pun champion]

  [Defending my title pourly]

  [I’m losing my cloudt]

  [Precipitating a loss at the next dome]

  [Maybe I’ll wind]

  [Snow way]

  [Guess it depends weather I’m there or not]

  [These things are hard to forecast]

  [It’s knot that hard]

  [We should hang out mon-soon]

  [Soon, ah. Me, you mean?]

  [Yes, her-I-can see soon?]

  [You’re really flooding my text inbox]

  And on and on until the phone itself revolts by freezing up.

  Gary Hallock is striving to find ways to build a similar practice element into the Facebook page for Punsters United Nearly Yearly (PUNY). The main way he does so is with pun prompts. Twice a week, Hallock posts a tried-and-true category, allowing group members to compete for “likes.” Open up the page any day and you might see the image of a fuel gauge, with the caption, “Here’s a topic we can oil pun on!” The jokes soon spew out in a geyser of vaudevillian word soup. “This topic should be a gas!” one person writes, possibly from inside the Bazooka Joe wrapper factory in 1956. “The odometer on my old car is so accurate . . . truly an honest engine!” another adds, instead of not doing that. Training this way can be helpful if for no other reason than as an endurance exercise—a flu shot inoculation against the pun virus you might contract at O. Henry.

  To prepare people for real-time punning, though, Gary went a step further and developed a way to duplicate the experience of live competition. In the lead-up to the last couple O. Henrys, Hallock organized what he calls Punslingers Stimulators, where two punsters can meet up in a Facebook chat window at a specified time and duke it out. Although this method is more accurate than punning against a stopwatch or tweeting jokes into the void for @Midnight, there’s really nothing that can re-create the pressure of standing in front of a crowd of hundreds, at the mercy of the masses. Being in a pun competition is truly the best possible preparation for a pun competition.

  9

  The Cauliflower’s Cumin from Inside the House

  It didn’t occur to me there was any chance I wouldn’t make it into the O. Henry—right until the moment I didn’t make it.

  This year, for the first time ever, the event’s organizing body opted to use a lottery system for admission. Demand for the World Series of pun competitions had simply become too rabid for the first-come-first-served days of yore. A flotilla of qualified but slow-fingered punsters were being left in the lurch, and something had to change. Converting to a lottery system would ostensibly level the playing field. Everyone who wanted in would have the same forty-eight-hour window to apply online, with competitors selected at random. Speed had been removed as a factor, leaving O. Henry admission in the hands of Tyche, Greek goddess of chance and providence.

  At 11:59 a.m. on April first, my click-finger hovered diligently over my laptop, triggering a muscle memory of fruitless attempts to score Radiohead tickets. A minute passed and registration was under way. I swiftly navigated all appropriate fields, submitting myself for Punniest of Show and Punslingers. There is no way I could have gone any faster, barring fingertip steroids. Three days later, though, I still received twin e-mail responses letting me know I’d been wait-listed for both events. It was like getting anorexic envelopes from Harvard and Yale at once, only far nerdier. While almost everyone I’d ever met before this past year might send a cease and desist letter upon being asked to enter the Pun Olympics, I was livid at the injustice of being denied.

  As the other Punderdomers received similar e-mails, updates began pouring in on an O. Henry Gmail thread like real-time election results.

  Tim and Sam, who worked together at Brokelyn, learned of their fate at the same time. Tim got into both events; Sam got into neither.

  “The patriarchy strikes again!” Tim crowed.

  Moments later, Nikolai revealed that he’d been double wait-listed like I had.

  “The patriarchy has failed me,” he said.

  Ally didn’t make it into either event. Neither did Ariel or Jordan. Isaac got Punslingers, but not Punniest of Show. Jerzy would be competing in both. I didn’t need to reach out to Ben Ziek to find out whether he’d made it in.

  Obviously, this was horseshit. The heavy hitters were getting a pass no matter what, and the rest of us were being shat out through some unknowable sorting hat. I couldn’t really blame the committee for this. Of course the O. Henry faithful would prefer to see Ziek or Jerzy face off against other known quantities, rather than go up against click-happy randos. But why did they have to start filtering now—the year so many Domers were planning to compete? Didn’t they realize the social sacrifices I’d personally made to get ready for O. Henry? That very weekend, while waiting to hear back, I’d been at a restaurant in the East Village, sharing a molcajete of guacamole and declared of its tame heat: “This is like Fisher Price: My First Spicy. It’s Fisher Spice.” I said that out loud, to people, and I had no ide
a if I was being ironic like Jen Kirkman or if I was being sincere. I just knew it was difficult to beat back this reflex after saying these kinds of things at Punderdome had made the crowd laugh.

  It was unclear how many people on the wait list would find their way into the thirty-two available slots for either event, but considering that so many of us just in Brooklyn were jockeying to get in, my odds didn’t look great. If I were to put together a Punniest of Show routine now, it would be for a competition I might not end up in. And this unfortunate possibility was hanging over my head the very next night at Punderdome.

  Sam is the first person I bump into at Littlefield that night, loose tufts of blond hair spilling out of her black knit cap, nervously devouring a Garfield-colored cardboard prism she claims is vegan pizza. Sam’s nervous because this is her first time competing in months, since her schedule became increasingly hectic. She’d recently started moving beyond Subreddit Live, the occasional revue she hosted with Ally, to experiment with other shows around the city. It had gone encouragingly well so far. Before drifting briefly away from Punderdome, though, Sam had become a six-time champion, making her nerves tonight kind of redundant. Or at least as redundant as vegan pizza.

  Sam has a story about the first pun she ever made. She was scarfing down a fish dinner one night, at ten years old, and she noticed a piece of salmon wedged into the shape of a cigar. On impulse, she picked it up and held it to her lips, Groucho style, and something just clicked. Her wordplay instinct booted up right then, and she announced to the table, “Hey: smoked salmon!” Her parents—both major fans of puns, salmon, and Sam—were delighted and proud, and an obsession was born.

  In high school, Sam studied etymology. She began to see the connections between words—the way police related to policy, and both derived from the Greek word polis, meaning “city.” Sam became a Latin nerd and a member of the Classics Club. She also began writing plays for the annual Classics competition, which was how she first found her calling. Although she’s an editor at Brokelyn and a Jill of all trades in New York comedy shows, Sam considers herself first and foremost a playwright. The world of theater is, to her, an endless laboratory in which to experiment with language. Sam loves stretching out words to investigate what’s inside them—and a lot of times, it turns out being puns. Her plays tend to have more puns than the average theater piece—not as linguistic accents, but essential ingredients. One of her plays, about a woman who is the messiah of postmodernism, is entirely composed of puns. It may sound like a far cry from typical theater, but it’s surprisingly not as far as one might think.