Can Puns Save Democracy? Probably not. But maybe a little?

A few days ago, I asked the comedian Myq Kaplan to send me a sampling of some of his recent puns. He responded:

—“e.e. cummings was not a fan of Capitalism, according to his letters.”

—“Okay, so you’re definitely the best at keeping your body completely still - what do you want, atrophy?”

—“I’d like to see a mashup of M*A*S*H and Up.”

His email made me happy for three reasons:

a) I think Myq is one of the best wordplay-ers alive.

b) After decades of skepticism and pun-hesitancy, I’ve come to appreciate puns. (1)

c) I think puns (and wordplay in general) might make us smarter citizens because they alert us to the ambiguity and slipperiness of language. They train us to be wary of democracy-eroding propaganda.

Okay, Claim (C) is a big one. It may well be a rationalization for my newfound respect for dad jokes (or at least intricate dad jokes -- paterfamilias jokes maybe? I don’t know).

Regardless, I’m going to take a shot at defending this correlation between puns and critical thinking.

As I mentioned above, I used to hate puns. Here’s an anti-pun passage from my first book, The Know-It-All – it occurs when I’m describing my trip to a Mensa convention (that’s the high IQ society).

Mensans love puns. I heard about how the eating of frogs’ legs makes the frogs hopping mad. A person who is interested in architecture has an edifice complex. When I met one Mensan who worked in a photo shop, he told me “It gives me a very negative outlook on life.”

“I shudder to think,” I responded, which simultaneously earned his respect and made me hate myself a lot.

Two reactions on re-reading this passage:

First, a photo shop? Things have certainly changed in twenty-plus years.

Second, maybe I shouldn’t have had so much self-loathing (and maybe I should have gone with the sentence “Things have certainly developed in twenty-plus years).

The point is, since writing my first book, I’ve made a U-turn on puns, or at least non-obvious twisty puns. I don’t consider myself a great punster. I’m no Myq Kaplan. But in recent years, I’ve improved a bit (or gotten worse, depending on your view of puns).

One reason for my newfound respect for puns is that I host a podcast all about word puzzles, which wouldn’t really exist without puns. Another is that my wife Julie is president of Watson Adventures Scavenger Hunts, a company that puts on events where teams work together to solve punny riddles (and have a delightful time doing it!)

But I like to tell myself that another reason I’m now pro-pun is that I had an epiphany: Puns serve a greater purpose. They make us more aware of something important about language: That it is often arbitrary, slippery, and ambiguous.

I believe my interest in puns has helped me become more linguistically aware, a more flexible thinker. Whenever I read the news nowadays, I’m hyper-conscious of the different meanings of words, which makes me more skeptical of people who try to manipulate language to make their point.

Consider the word “free” as an example. “Free” has multiple definitions. Mostly, it’s got a positive aura to it. So when you say “free market,” for instance, you’re immediately disposed to like a free market. But if a market is totally “free” in this sense—zero government regulations whatsoever—it may cause the opposite of freedom in other ways: monopolies thrive, customers lack freedom of choice, and workers lack freedom to negotiate.

Do I have proof that puns make us better thinkers? Sadly, there’s no decades-long study in which a pun-loving population and a pun-hating population create two societies from scratch, allowing us to study which is more susceptible to propaganda and authoritarianism.

But if you conduct a Google Scholar search, you can find some hints that back up my idea. Such as…

—A study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences argues that pun-based humor “not only facilitates insight problem-solving directly, but may also exert an indirect positive influence on insight problem-solving through cognitive flexibility.”

—A neuroscience paper arguing that puns ignite the same areas of the brain as frame-shifting, which is key for problem-solving.

—A paper linking awareness of ambiguous words with critical thinking.

So…maybe?

Puns, of course, have their downsides. First, I’ve been in conversations with people who are so focused on making puns that they can’t engage in meaningful dialogue.

Some argue, as Samuel Johnson allegedly did, that puns are a “lower form of wit.” (It’s not clear he said this, but he did once write that Shakespeare’s weakness for following puns “engulfed him in the mire.” Johnson later — allegedly, again — confessed to his own pun use, saying: “If I were to be punishèd for every pun I shed, there would be no puny shed of my punnish head.”)

Also in puns’ disfavor: people often refer to puns as “groaners.” But I’d argue not all puns are groaners. Only the easy ones. If someone on a tennis court complains about losing his balls and his friend replies with a comment about testicles, I don’t think the friend should automatically be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are the puns so complex and intricate that they require mental gymnastics of a Simone Biles-ian level.

Perhaps the most elaborate pun I’ve run across is by Thomas Pynchon. In his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon relates a story about the classic film director Cecille B. DeMille, a fleet of rowboats, and a bunch of criminals in the fur trade. Does this story advance the novel’s plot? Not at all, but it allowed Pynchon to write the following sentence at the end of the section:

“For DeMille, young fur henchman cannot be rowing.”

Get it? I didn’t. But when I looked it up, it turns out to be an elaborate pun on the phrase “40 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” which was a 1920s phrase arguing that France’s pro-alcohol, sex-positive attitudes were superior to America’s puritanism.

Perhaps you could accuse Pynchon of making too great a leap — that it’s no fun if there’s so little chance of figuring the pun out. But I still appreciate the effort.

I also appreciate when puns are pushed to their limit in another direction – namely, a relentless barrage of puns. In fact, I’ll end with my friend (and new dad!) Joe Sabia’s award-winning pun routine in the O. Henry Museum Pun-Off World Championships a few years back — along with a request that readers put their favorite (or least favorite) puns in the comments section.

FOOTNOTE:

(1) Speaking of language and ambiguity, the word “pun” is used to indicate several related but distinct types of wordplay. The types of wordplay that are technically most punny include:

a) Homographs – Substituting a word that is spelled the same but has a different meaning. “One toilet said to the other, ‘You look flushed’.”

b) Homophones – Substituting a word that is spelled differently but pronounced the same or similarly: Mad magazine once parodied the magazine I worked at by calling it Entertainment Weakly (instead of Entertainment Weekly).

But people also sometimes use the word ‘pun’ to refer to

c) Portmanteau words, such as “bromance” – even though the words being combined retain their original meaning.

d) Rhyming phrases, in which you substitute a word for one that rhymes with it. (e.g. a sample headline from the above-mentioned EW magazine: An item on an art exhibit called “Gone Titian,” a play on the phrase Gone Fishin’).

(Finally: Thanks to Ariel Cortez for the bird image!)