“Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it”*…
The English language is almost nightmarishly expansive, and yet there is no good way to respond when someone drops a bad pun in casual conversation.
“Stop” seems ideal, but it’s too late—they already did it. If your esophagus cooperates, you can mimic a human chuckle, or you can just steamroll through, ignoring the elephant now parked in your conversational foyer. Either way, having to deal at all with the demand that wordplay be acknowledged is probably the reason so many people think they hate puns.
Those people are wrong…
More on this variety of not-merely-meretricious merriment at : “If You Think You Hate Puns, You’re Wrong.”
* Jonathan Swift
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As we ponder Alfred Hitchcock’s assertion that “puns are the highest form of literature,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that Monty Python was formed. Graham Chapman was trained and educated to be a physician, but that career trajectory was never meant to be. John Cleese was writing for TV personality David Frost and actor/comedian Marty Feldman at the time, when he recruited Chapman as a writing partner and “sounding board”. BBC offered the pair a show of their own in 1969, when Cleese reached out to former How To Irritate People writing partner Michael Palin, to join the team. Palin invited his own writing partner Terry Jones and colleague Eric Idle over from rival ITV, who in turn wanted American-born Terry Gilliam for his animations.
The Pythons considered several names for their new program, including “Owl Stretching Time”, “The Toad Elevating Moment”, “Vaseline Review” and “A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket.” “Flying Circus” had come up as well. The name stuck when BBC revealed that they had already printed flyers, and weren’t about to go back to the printer.
