Although I’m fired up to see who will win, I no longer exist in human form, but rather as a spirit locked inside a seashell echoing with puns. The crowd is hanging on by a thread, too. Everybody either needs a stretch, or they’re trying to figure out whether they have enough space to lie on the ground, facedown like a skydiver, and whether that’s appropriate. One small child wearing a polo shirt with a bow tie lies slumped over, off in his happy place, while his mom eats a chimichanga. Another woman is using a plump Dalmatian as a footstool. Not a single cell phone remains unchecked. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Through the haze of beer, sun, and a pulverizing amount of puns, the war of words is wrapping up.
At first, it looks like Punster of the Year Andy Balinsky, who has shed his Shakespeare costume for more of a Little League dad look, is going to dispatch with Tim quickly. On the topic of Glassware, Tim narrowly avoids a strike, awkwardly bouncing around onstage in Converses with no socks, trying to come up with suitable puns. He stands his ground, though, and eventually triumphs, looking nearly as surprised at this unexpected victory as his opponent.
We’re hoping for a similar turnaround when Jordan starts struggling on the topic of Wind against Jerry, defeater of Isaac, but after only a couple minutes, he is vanquished.
Soon enough, it’s an American Civil War in the house of Gwiazdowski: Jerzy versus Toby. I had long thought it was possible we’d see two brothers from this family go against each other here—just not these two. The category is Furniture, and the pair cycle through the easy puns like “Sofa so good” in record time. I keep looking back at their parents, seated nearby on a flannel blanket, to see whether they’re cheering for either brother in particular. Like most parents, though, if they have a favorite, they are keeping it to themselves.
“What it must have been like growing up in that house!” Gary says, speaking for all seven hundred people here.
After a few minutes, the puns start degenerating as the furniture warehouse is liquidated.
“If other kinds of barbecue can’t satisfy you, can ribs?” Jerzy says, looking around expectantly. The crowd is stone silent. Finally, he explains; it’s a pun on “cribs.” Yikes. This is by far the least comprehensible pun I’ve ever heard Jerzy make. Truly, it’s difficult to see any situation besides this one in which those words could be considered a pun. Toby seems stretched just as thin, though. He’s about to hit a five-count, so he just goes for it.
“I live in Wisconsin and my brother lives in New York. I wish he was armoire,” he says. Nobody knows what this means.
“Around more,” he clarifies.
Jerzy is about to respond and then he stops and scrunches his eyebrows, like he just registered what Toby said. Then he crosses the scrimmage line to go hug his brother. From this sweet moment, though, things go goofily dark. Jerzy’s eyes practically bug out when his brother says, “I can’t afford flowers so I’ll be sure to have a fern at your funeral.”
“Next time I see your car in the parking lot, Toby, I-key-ya,” he responds.
Ten minutes in, Toby is about to go down. He starts babbling on a four-count, clearly buying time, before he ends on “I like when people stair at me.”
Brian and Gary thoughtfully debate whether stairs are considered furniture and eventually they give Toby a strike. He now has five seconds to make another pun, which he holds off on doing until the last possible second.
“After having twins last year, my wife wants me to pull out.”
This line gets one of the loudest, longest laughs of the entire day. Jerzy reaches over and gives him a high five.
On his next turn, Toby asks, “Can’t you let booth of us win?”
Jerzy steps up to respond, almost talks and then doesn’t. The count is at three, four. A look comes over his eyes. He’s got something. Of course, he’s got something. I can’t wait to hear what it is. When Jerzy speaks, though, he speaks very quietly.
“Congratulations,” he says and steps back.
Toby’s jaw drops, along with most of the audience’s, and his arms fly in the air, a human Y. He is overjoyed. He and Jerzy melt into a hug as everybody in the crowd screams. The entire Brooklyn group is on our feet, stunned. Nobody saw this coming. I can’t help wonder whether if that had been Ben Ziek up there instead of his brother, would Jerzy have forged on, digging deep and dredging up something? Maybe not. Maybe Toby outplayed him, fair and square.
It’s now down to the final four: Ben Ziek, Jerry Yan, Toby, and Tim. During a brief respite before the next round, Gracie comes over and joins our group.
“What did you think about that ‘carrying high’ bullshit?” Ariel asks her.
“I was screaming from the judges’ table!” she says.
“There should really be a female MC,” Ariel responds.
Gracie admits what she told me the previous night, that Gary and David wanted her to MC this year but she opted out.
“It seems too nerve-racking, and I don’t want to get booed,” she says, and then she looks at Ariel, Ally, and Sam’s disappointed faces. “But I guess the judges get booed a lot anyway, so yeah, I’ll do it next year.”
The women of Punderdome all break out into big, face-stretching smiles, and then we wait around for the final rounds.
As satisfying as I would’ve thought it would be to see Ziek rip apart Jerry Yan, it is not. The kid gets a nosebleed going into the round, little bulbs of tissue burrowing out of his nostril, and his condition does not improve over the following fifteen minutes of torture. The two start off rapid-fire riffing on the topic of Currency—“Let me be franc with you,” the inevitable doll hairs—with Ziek immediately returning everything Jerry serves his way, and Jerry firing back as fast as he can.
“Gonna be washing tons of clothing after this,” Jerry says, pointing at his bloody nose.
“You better find a tub, man,” Ziek says, and the crowd erupts in awed cheers. I’m amazed at how fast he responded, and how perfectly the response fit. He must’ve had Harriet Tubman’s new dollar in his back pocket, saving it for just the right moment. It feels significant, like the legendary Shot Heard ’Round the World from the 1951 Giants/Dodgers pennant race—only nobody will ever remember this, even for one second.
The further along this round gets, the more Jerry looks like the ghost of someone who died from food poisoning. His face is tomato red, and his arms are cradling his torso as though his insides have liquefied and he’s about to start leaking. Despite all that, I’m still impressed with Jerry’s ability to keep up with his opponent. Ziek seems impressed, too.
“Euro really good punster,” he tells Jerry, and it’s one of the sweetest, nerdiest things that’s happened all day.
“I went up against Ziek in the third round once,” Gracie tells Ally and me. “The category was Fabric, so I thought I had it in the bag, but he had worked at a clothing factory or something, and he was pulling out words I’ve never even heard of.”
This is what Ziek does. He bleeds you dry. He keeps going and going until you are dead and incapable of returning fire. He’s a diabolical pun cyborg; the friendliest, most gracious and upbeat pun cyborg the competitive word circuit has ever seen.
After he and Jerry run through alternative forms of currency like spice, salt, and bullion, Jerry tries to make a pun on iridium. The judges debate it for a moment, but don’t allow it. Jerry has lasted longer than most, but he’s out.
Ziek moves on to the finals, where he was perhaps always headed. All that’s left to be determined is whether Tim or Toby will join him. As the pair makes their way up to the stage, almost everybody from Punderdome starts chanting Tim’s name. Then we remember that Toby’s parents are sitting right behind us—even though Papa G is currently snoozing—and we stop.
The topic is Temperature, and both competitors seem too drained to think of even vaguely scientific puns. Things are going not very well for either Tim or Toby, but slightly worse for Tim, who has a strike. Then, a few minutes in, Toby stumbles. He starts talking
to buy himself time, laying tracks ahead while the train is moving, and what he settles on is that temperature, as a topic, is “very cool.” The judges rule that this is not a pun, to which the audience revolts. The ruling stands anyway.
“That’s not cool!” Ally yells.
Toby has five seconds to come up with another pun.
“I heat another second,” he says, but “heat” has long since waved good-bye as an option. It’s a second strike.
“Your brothers are good at punning, but I’d hate to see your son burn you at this,” Tim says, a forecast about the next generation of Gwiazdowski punsters.
Toby has no comeback at first. He grimaces, his cheeks practically touching his eyebrows. You can see the gears spinning in his head, looking for purchase. Then he swipes his mic through the air like he’s slamming a door. He’s finished.
Tim has done it. There will be a Punderdomer in the finals of the 2016 O. Henry.
At some point leading up to his face-off with Andy Balinsky, Tim realized he was going further in this competition than he’d prepared for, and he stopped drinking whiskey and beer. Although the resulting partial sobriety has been the wind beneath his wings up until now, Tim looks unsteady on his feet as he gets ready to battle a ten-minutes-rested Ben Ziek. He realizes the topic is Periodic Tables, and you can almost see his spirit crush like a soda can. Then he waves his fists like he’s reeling in fish while punching them, and shakes Ziek’s hand.
If I were a betting man, I would never in a million years put my money on Tim. It only takes one minute for this investment strategy to prove sound.
“I wish I paid more attention in chemistry class . . .” Tim says, before bowing out.
Jerzy shakes his head and snorts. He knows his periodic tables better than the tables he couldn’t quite conjure in the furniture round. If he were up there, he could take Ziek. Maybe.
It’s an anticlimactic end to the competition. Ziek wins his fifth Punslingers at the O. Henry, which likely won’t be his last. He’ll certainly have Tim, and Jerzy and one or two other Gwiazdowskis hot on his heels again next year, though.
“My first year, I came in second, too,” Ziek tells Tim, as the two are shaking hands. “So you’re set up to win next year.”
“You guys are on so much of a higher level than we are,” David Gugenheim tells the two of them, smiling through weary eyes. “Or ‘were,’ I guess.”
Here’s how much the O. Henry crowd loves puns. After something like seven hours of puns in the arid Texas heat, thirty people show up to the after-party for more. It never stops, the churn of wordplay. Not here, not ever. It’s a babbling brook whose whooshes howl through the forest until the end of time.
The party is at a family-friendly Mexican restaurant, with ambulatory, mustachioed jalapeños on the walls. Amid sizzling plumes of fajita steam, the MCs, organizers, contestants, and attendees line up to play pun games that inspired some of the ones Jerzy and Jordan play on their podcast. Ziek makes a pun and looks out at the crowd like a golfer tracking his ball to see where it lands. Newly crowned O. Henry MVP Janani Krishnan-Jha makes a pun and looks at her mother, who is clearly proud of this bright, talented young woman, who makes competitive punning seem less weird than it is. (“This is like the best day of my life,” she tells me.) Isaac makes a pun and smiles to himself when he gets the big laugh. He didn’t do as well as he wanted, but there’s always Punderdome.
We don’t stay for very long. Instead, we explore nocturnal Austin. Ubiquitous bike racks, women in silver elastic space pants, vegan cheeseburgers at Cheer Up Charlies, unexplained Batman costumes on patio bars. Everybody is still high off our big showing at O. Henry, and we keep collecting people from the competition like Michael the Trump impersonator and a woman named Anika who went down in the first round of Punslingers. We go dancing at Hotel Vegas and Sam finds herself in a Step Up–style dance-off with a guy whose jean shirt is unbuttoned to the navel. We walk through the Pecan Street Festival, which at night turns into a Bourbon Street monstrosity, overflowing with boozed-out frat bros. Still, Isaac manages to get in a rap battle and holds his own better than anybody expects. Everyone is in his or her element, or they have multiple elements that all inform each other.
Toward the end of the night, someone raises the idea of getting a pun tattoo.
“All right, I’d be down,” Tim says.
“What’s a good pun tattoo?
“Don’t get one!”
“That’s not a pun.”
“A pun is a thing that means another thing,” I say, several sheets to the breeze and barely holding it together. “It’s a cryptograph. So maybe like a Rosetta stone?”
“We can write ‘ling’ and it will be an ‘inkling.’”
“Let’s keep the brainstorm going!”
We talk about it for a little longer and then the topic disperses like a game of Movie Title puns. Probably for the best. The idea of a tattoo runs utterly counter to what we love about puns. The moment the right pun happens, and you were there to see the elements come together—that’s what makes a pun, not the Brundlefly of words. Puns are ephemeral, impermanent, temporary visitors. Whatever was said is almost beside the point—it’s the situation itself, the people who were there, the way that you laughed. And then it’s gone. A tattoo could never bring it back. You had to be there.
Conclusion
The night we return from Austin, the Gwiazdowski brothers host their first live podcast at the People’s Improv Theater in Manhattan. Most of the O. Henry crew show up to help give the games more variety, like the time we all recorded together in DUMBO so many months ago. The turnout is better than decent, and the laughs are steady. It’s a markedly different format than Punderdome, the competitive aspect excised, but the crowd seems nearly as engaged as they do when the clap-o-meter is involved. It’s a bold step toward the future of the podcast.
The episode never comes out.
A few weeks after recording, the brothers get into a heated argument and Jordan leaves the show. Jerzy promises he’ll revive it someday, but for now Punk Assed is over. At the same time, Ariel and her pun partner, Tracy, are almost out of beta with their own pun podcast, which should be ready soon.
Later in the year, Jerzy gets a job at the New School teaching in the BFA drama program. He says he still wants to be a comedy writer for a late-night talk show some day, even though he hasn’t tried stand-up at an open mic yet. Around the time he takes the teaching job, he also cuts his hair. He no longer looks like a magician.
Ben Ziek never got called back for Jeopardy!, but he plans on taking the online test again in October.
After the O. Henry, Tim is punned out and ready to take a sabbatical from the Dome. When Brokelyn hosts the official release party for the Punderdome card game, he lets Sam do the honors alone. A month later, Sam releases a video of fashion puns through InStyle magazine. It gets a ton of views, and she is excited to make more videos.
In June, Jonah Spear launches the first East Coast version of his Bay Area Pun-Off, the simply titled New York Pun-Off, in a loft in Manhattan. Not as many people show up as they did to the first event in San Francisco, but Jonah is enthusiastic. Meanwhile, in D.C., former Dome champ Brian Agler, a.k.a. Punda Express, has been helping a new competition called Beltway Pundits get off the ground. Later this year, he’ll move back to New York and revive Punda Express.
Also over the summer, Toby Gwiazdowski graduates from competing in Pundamonium in Milwaukee, to hosting it.
At the Punderdome in July, I get my first-ever 10 from the clap-o-meter, on the topic of Amusement Parks. While waiting for my turn, I fixated on the words scattered across my board and they started to cohere into a story.
“I proposed to my girlfriend recently,” I said. “And I was a little nervous, so I ducked into a safety bar. My stomach was growling but I ate a ton-of-o-loves. Then I got down on dis-knee, and said ‘It’s you-n-I-vs. all.’ After that, I did a ring toss. And though she was wearing a chastity belt, she finally
removed her Bush guardin’s.”
I delivered the monologue with a confused smile and a vocal uptick at the end of each sentence, like I was a little embarrassed but I absolutely had to share this weird true story. The funny thing is, it was the truth. Well, not entirely the truth. I’d long ago proposed to my wife, and it didn’t go anything like that, but the presentation was truthful. I was a little embarrassed, and I did feel confident enough in my routine that I absolutely had to share it. I’d finally found a pun style: just being myself.
“Is that true?” Fred asked afterward.
“Sort of, but we definitely slept together before I proposed.”
When the clap-o-meter rated my applause at a 10, I basked in the satisfaction of finally getting past the first round, after eight Punderdomes and one turn at O. Henry. The only problem was that three other people got 10s that round, a Dome record. It wasn’t a lenient clap-o-meter either—the quality of the punning here just keeps improving, making it harder sometimes to distinguish a winner.
After three slapdash clap-offs, during which I quickly ran out of dance moves and ended up squat-thrusting, the other three 10s were chosen to move on to the next round. Nikolai, Ariel, Jerzy, and Jordan all congratulated me, though. They knew what this turn meant. Not that I was on their level yet—not even close, really—but maybe I was one of them after all.
In late July, Punderdome had its second annual battle against the New York Post team at the Highline Ballroom. It was almost exactly a year since the previous one, the first pun competition I’d ever seen. On the day of the event, Ally started a text thread, trying to coordinate a meetup. As always, the thread promptly degenerated into puns.
“A defeat for News Corp. will be good for what Ailes them,” Ariel wrote.
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