Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  It smells like sizzling pork sandwiches and gooey Mexican food under the tent. The crowd sits on unfurled blankets and towels, beside coffin-size coolers, shifting positions regularly like they’re stuck on pointy twigs. Frat bros, dungeon masters, and mommy bloggers all share the same facial expression. It’s anticipation of amusement—an agape-mouth-with-flies-moving-in-and-out kind of look. There’s also the occasional satisfied grin of someone memorizing a pun to repeat later.

  “They don’t have to be good” is the watchword of Punslingers, a constant mantra for when someone drops a pun so bad you can’t even believe it. We don’t have to wait very long to hear it. Steve Brooks says it after Hannah Nelson’s very first pun in the very first face-off, on the subject of Farming—“A lot of fakers out here. You know, like ‘acres’?”—just before Ben Ziek systematically dismantles her.

  “I like to pig out on food,” Hannah says, sunburned beneath a floral shift dress.

  “Me, too,” Ziek replies. “And then I like to take a big crop.”

  He returns every pun with ping-pong topspin and a conversational flourish, and he’s gently funny. The crowd swoons.

  “I like to go to the old McDonald’s to get a burger,” Hannah offers.

  “I’m much loftier than that,” Ziek shoots back.

  Well, they’re not always funny. But they keep coming, unrelentingly, until Hannah fouls out a few minutes later.

  Punslingers works much differently than the duels that end Punderdome each month. There’s no time limit, which allows more sure-footed opponents like Ziek to wage a war of attrition. Because the first round has plenty of first-timers, the MCs give contestants a chance to fix puns that are not puns, such as Hannah’s offering, “I recently bought a trucker hat,” which baffles everyone. Each time a contestant repeats a pun their opponent has already used, he or she takes a strike, which is noted on a number flipboard center stage. The crowd has a way of keeping the MCs on their toes when a pun has already been used: they yell out “Used!” over and over until the strike is registered. Three strikes and you’re out. Don’t come up with a pun after a five-count and you’re out. When it’s Brian Oakley doing the count, he brings his arm forward like a fly fisherman, making numbers with his fingers. His eyes betray a solemn respect for upholding justice in this duty.

  Sometimes the MCs’ edicts seem rather arbitrary. In an early round on Space Travel, they put the kibosh on all fictional space vehicles after the players pun on Millennium Falcon and Chewbacca, which seems odd. They could’ve just specifically outlawed Star Wars puns and left open intellectual property such as Moonraker, the Enterprise, and Event Horizon. Considering how long some of these rounds go on for, though, I guess I should thank them.

  In order to preemptively fend off strikes, almost every player ends up explaining their puns right after saying them. Sometimes they do it in the meek tone of a person trying to get out of a parking ticket. Other times, it’s with the authoritarian steamroller style of Bill O’Reilly warding off any counterarguments. The funny puns don’t need an explanation ninety-nine times out of one hundred, and when the unfunny ones are explained, they often go from nonsensical to depressing. The lone bright spot of this excessive explanation comes early on when the Space Travel category prompts one woman to say, “You’d better lance that wound you’re getting with all these sharp puns. You know, like Lance Armstrong?” It’s not every day you see a person learn that the first man to walk on the moon did not also win the Tour de France or lose a testicle.

  After playing the Movie Title game all weekend, the entire Punderdome group perks up when Movie Titles is announced as a topic in round one. It’s the sheriff from earlier in the day, improv master Dav Wallace, against the sex lumberjack whom Gracie rated a “69.” Several of their puns are decent, but after all the movie titles that had us cracking up over the past few days, these mostly sound like unsexy porn parodies. It reminded me of the pun-titled Air Bud series, a spirited collection of films about a sporty dog that includes Golden Receiver, Seventh Inning Fetch, and Air Bud Spikes Back.

  “This Japanese emperor slapped a guy from Japan, it was the Empire Strikes Vlad,” says the bearded guy who, mere hours ago, on this very stage, made a pun about rimjobs.

  “‘Vlad’ doesn’t even sound like ‘Back,’” Sam says in a huff.

  “And why was he Japanese?” I ask. “How many Japanese Vlads are there?”

  Later, the same guy simply says, “It was Lucky Number Seven,” and explains that this is a pun on the justly forgotten Josh Hartnett film Lucky Number Slevin. It was a pun on a pun title, turned back into a nonpun, like if someone laundered drug money to buy more drugs.

  I grope around desperately for one of Tim’s beers and promise to pick up the next twelve-pack.

  Some of the players have a clear command of strategy. They know to phrase puns in the form of questions, which psychologically pushes their opponents to respond quicker than they otherwise might have. This maneuver also helps if your pun is weak and possibly strikable, because if the other person starts responding before the judges move to strike it, that person has officially accepted the pun. The question strategy can backfire for rookies, though. Heavy hitters like Ziek and Jerzy can reflexively answer any question in pun form, so you’d better be ready to have a whole conversation if you start up with them.

  Some of the other players don’t seem to know what they’re doing at all, as though they were on the way to go pick up some Cracklin’ Oat Bran and accidentally ended up onstage.

  Jordan Gwiazdowski’s challenger is an elder hippie in a headband who looks like he’s been lying low in Hawaii since the heat cracked down on the Manson family.

  “I feel like a bird on a wire,” he opines, on the category of Birds.

  “Now that’s an example of a pun that’s not a pun,” Steve Brooks says. “That’s a cliché.”

  Jordan has been practicing for an entire year. He deserves a more formidable opponent than this sweet old dude. It’s obvious that Jordan will win, but he’s a graceful winner. At one point, he gestures to his clearly outplayed opponent and says, “Some of you can’t make puns but this fella can.”

  The adorable old guy stares straight ahead in silence for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll fly away,” before skedaddling off.

  Very few other rounds end as quickly. In one, a rangy hair metal wizard defeats Arlen, who looks like a wizard who has retired in Fort Lauderdale, with a single pun. Tim Donnelly wins his round on Railroads in practically no time, and Toby Gwiazdowski makes short work of his challenger as well.

  “He’s a Gwiazdowski,” Sam declares. “It’s in his blood.”

  Isaac and Jerzy have slightly longer first rounds, but cakewalks they are not. Isaac’s opponent turns out to be the male half of the young couple that booked it out of the banquet the previous night, shortly after they arrived. He’s a sporty bro in shoes with fluorescent laces, who looks like he just got back from the gym. It seems to be kismet in his favor that the category is Exercise. Early on, though, MC Brian Oakley gets up to a four-count waiting for the guy to make a pun, and all he comes up with is, “I’ll just have to muscle through this one.”

  Steve Brooks shakes his head and frowns.

  “‘Muscle through’ is not a pun,” he says. “Can you make a pun on the word muscle?”

  Isaac’s opponent, who is probably at this moment on the paleo diet, puts his hands on his hips.

  “I was trying to fish for clams the other day, but all I caught was a muscle?”

  The line is met with strictly participation trophy laughter.

  “If you can’t think of a muscle pun the first time, just weight for it,” Isaac says, and swaggers a few steps back to his spot. He looks like he has this locked up, and eventually he does.

  Everybody from Brooklyn—well buzzed by now—gasps when Jerzy’s category is revealed. It’s the American Civil War, the kind of topic that would probably never come up at Punderdome. Jerzy looks totally unfazed, though. H
e’s prepared for this sort of thing by now. But the guy in baggy dad jeans whom he’s up against seems ready, too.

  “Ever go to Pamplona and see the Bull Run?” he asks, eyes downcast beneath his glasses.

  “Yeah, you’re doing a good job Lincoln these words together,” Jerzy says.

  “Sumpter is better than nothing.”

  “Sher-man,” Jerzy replies.

  The crowd wails, and Jerzy’s opponent smiles begrudgingly. They volley back and forth another few minutes, until the guy stumbles responding to a cannonball pun. He’s out.

  Ariel is up next. She hits the stage looking cheerful in a backwards bike messenger cap with pastel flowers. Our whole group winces, though, when her category is announced as Country Music. Max, Sam, Ally, and I look at one another searchingly, as though one of us might have intel on Ariel’s ties to the Nashville music scene. No one wants to admit to stereotyping country music fans, but Ariel just doesn’t seem like one of them.

  She starts out making puns on top-tier female country stars. She does Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, and Taylor Swift from the days before Kanye almost let her finish. Then she hits a snag.

  “Of chords my next pun is gonna be about music,” she says.

  “The category is Country Music, not Musical Instruments or Musical Terms,” Brian says, nearly as stern as Walter in The Big Lebowski yelling “Over the line!” on a tiny bowling infraction. Her pun was definitely a stretch, but the MCs have let worse slide already today. The crowd collectively sucks its teeth. Ariel puts her hands on her sides—smiling but indignant.

  “Arms akimbo, really?” Brian says.

  “Ugh, she’s allowed to be akimbo,” Ally says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t, with this.”

  Just when Ariel looks like she’s about to go down, she says, “I like to cook on the border of two states: I wok the line.”

  Everybody in the crowd cheers, and so does Brian Oakley, despite his harshness moments ago. Ariel’s opponent, a tall, Brillo-haired guy in glasses, sends a puzzling Johnny Cash pun right back in her direction.

  “I shot a man in the peen-o just to watch him dry,” he says, shrugging.

  “I, uh,” Ariel says, fingers flexing, as if trying to pluck a pun out of the ether. “I’m gonna use ‘wok the line’ again so I can get a strike and have more time.”

  Brian flips over the first strike sign and starts doing a five-count on his hands. Even though she bought herself a few more seconds, though, Ariel is now just staring at his hands, pursed lips beneath a quivering brow. Her time has run out.

  Ariel is composed enough to reach over and shake her challenger’s hand before scurrying off the stage. Sam immediately gets up from the blanket and runs after her.

  Due to a clerical error, Janani Krishnan-Jha, a silky-haired high school senior, has to battle two opponents in one anomalous three-way round. She’s up against an unhappy-looking older man with eerily smooth shins, and the cocky older brother from a British coming-of-age movie about soccer hooligans. This quickly becomes the tensest contest of the day so far.

  The MCs seem to be actively trying to avoid causing discomfort for a person of Indian heritage. They go a little overboard apologizing about mangling Janani’s name, but at least they’re trying. However, this is all the respect they grant her, as Janani seems to get challenged for her puns more than her male opponents on the topic of Moviemaking. The older player makes two conflicting puns on the word her—“I had to direct her up here,” and “I had to trail her up here”—and the judges let it slide. Meanwhile, Janani has to emphatically defend several of her puns.

  Moments after Brian and David announce that proper names like George Lu-cuss are no longer viable, Janani says she had a friend named Elizabeth Donatto whom she calls “Ellie D.” Even though the soccer hooligan accepts the pun by starting his next turn, David charges toward the flipboard.

  “You just said a proper name; that’s a strike,” he says.

  “I believe the pun was on LED,” Janani says, calmly.

  Back in the crowd, we’re screaming our lungs out to defend Janani as though she were our collective love child. Eventually, David overturns the strike. It feels like being on the ground floor of the least consequential civil rights battle in years.

  “I can’t believe this is reel,” Janani says on her next turn, perhaps an indirect wink to her supporters.

  In the end, she outlasts both competitors, ironically when Manchester United accidentally reuses the other guy’s “trail her” pun and trails Janani permanently.

  By the end of round one, the crowd’s spirit is broken. Laughs and applause are far scarcer than during Punniest of Show, people coming most alive in the face of possible injustice. It gets so quiet sometimes, you can hear birdsong in the tent and the sound of Tupperware unfastening. Meghan sums up the general sentiment succinctly: “I no longer care what anybody onstage has to say.” Then she passes me a flask of whiskey.

  As round two gets going, though, a new charge crackles in the air. The serious threats start to play each other in heats that feel more like trench warfare.

  Dav Wallace, who has been an improv performer since 1997, proves a worthy adversary for Jordan Gwiazdowski. The two spar back and forth on Fairy Tales in a friendly grudge match. Jordan’s puns have a little more panache at first—the difference between “Let’s beast-erious” and “Sleeping booty”—but Dav keeps them coming, forcing Jordan into survival mode. The inner turmoil of wanting to win with style, and needing to simply outlast, is written in the creases of Jordan’s forehead. After a while, though, Dav starts to lose stamina.

  “This is getting grimm,” he says, ten minutes in.

  After squeaking by on a few almost strikes, like “This is the last draw” as a pun on the concept of straw in fairy tales, Dav goes out by reusing a Rapunzel pun.

  Jordan had the misfortune of going up against Ben Ziek in the first round the previous year, and his first opponent today wasn’t a challenge at all. This bout with Dav Wallace is the first time he’s truly proven his mettle at the O. Henry.

  Isaac is up next, facing off against Jerry Yan, who barely won his first at-bat.

  “He’s got this one sewn up,” I tell Jordan.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” he says. “Toby and this guy are always bumping up against each other at Pundamonium.”

  Apparently, this young man with a perfectly symmetrical bowl cut is the Ben Ziek to Toby’s Jerzy. Or something like that. The topic of his round with Isaac is Pregnancy, which seems like it can end no other way than “creepily.” I brace myself for puns about placenta.

  “Baby Jesus didn’t diaper your sins,” Jerry says, and we’re off to the races.

  “There might be a baby in your gaze, sir, you have fertile-eyes,” Isaac says, coquettishly, a hand on the side of his face.

  The two remain on even keel for a long while, but then, for the first time I’ve ever seen, Isaac starts to sweat. Even when he lost in March to the Pundance Kid, he remained cool as an Otter Pop the entire time. Now he’s throwing out puns like, “You’re such a boob,” just to stay in it, and rubbing his neck. He looks jarred not to hear applause from the weary crowd after each pun, a contrast to the amped-up Punderdome audience.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry for this one,” Jerry says, preemptively cringing at what he’s about to say. “Why don’t you just SIDS down?”

  Half the crowd laughs nervously.

  “I have a worse one,” Isaac says, “and my ship is heading toward it because it’s abort of call.”

  All the Punderdomers ferociously cheer Isaac for his quick comeback, before we realize how loudly we’re cheering an abortion joke and pipe down.

  When Isaac makes a pun that involves a stoned expecting mother carrying high, the MCs debate whether to accept it. They are unfamiliar with the expression “carrying high,” which infuriates the women of Punderdome.

  “You don’t know because you’re not a woman!” Ariel yells.

  After Janani’
s round, our sexism sensors are all on overdrive. Ben Ziek has made a pun since then about RuPaul, and we all parsed and dissected each word before concluding that it was devoid of offense. Similarly, the judges eventually see the light about Isaac’s pun and let it through. Less than a minute later, though, he gets his third strike, for reusing umbilical as a cue word. He raises his hands in the air, as if the strike is a mistake, but it isn’t. Just like that, as goes the umbilical, so goes Isaac’s last lifeline in the competition. He’s out.

  All the Domers automatically root for our fellow travelers. We’re the Away team, after all. This loyalty is tested, however, in the next matchup, in which Jerzy has to take on Janani. We cheer every clever pun he makes on the topic of Hair, but we cheer just as hard when she claps back.

  “I brought all my people with me,” Jerzy says a few minutes in, gesturing toward us. “But unfortunately my crew cut themselves on something very sharp.”

  Janani sways from side to side for a moment.

  “If I don’t come up with a pun soon, I’ll wave good-bye.”

  “Permanently,” Jerzy clarifies, without missing a beat. Janani starts swaying again.

  She puts up a hell of a fight, coming at Jerzy with everything she has, and even forcing him into a couple of strikes. After several more minutes, though, she stumbles, making a pun on “turban,” which doesn’t fly with the MCs.

  “We have a separate topic for hats and headwear,” David says. “We’ll give you a chance to fix it, though.”

  Janani gazes out into the middle distance and says, “If I make the cut, let’s celebrate.”

  Steve points out that cut has already been used. Janani smiles hopefully and says “Cutlets?”

  “That’s not a haircut,” he says, flipping over a third strike. “That’s a piece of chicken.”

  It’s over. Jerzy goes to shake Janani’s hand and she hugs him, leading Sam to chant, “They should date! They should date!”

  When Tim and Toby are up, they both handily defeat their second-round opponents. It’s particularly satisfying to watch Toby take down the Brillo-headed guy who knocked out Ariel. As we head into the third round, only eight punsters remain. Three of them are Gwiazdowskis. I take a look at the scoreboard off to the side of the pavilion, which features brackets of all the matchups so far. It appears that pretty soon, Toby and Jerzy will be competing against each other.