Posts Tagged ‘humor’
“Metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world”*…
A. J. Jacobs, in defense of “the lowest form of humor“…
… 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…
“Can Puns Save Democracy? Probably not. But maybe a little?“
See also: “Pun for the Ages” (gift article, and source of te image above)
And for contrast(?), enjoy: “A Collection of Terrible Puns.”
* “Metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world. When both innovative and relevant, they can wake up a reader, make him or her aware, through elasticity of verbiage, that reality—in our daily lives as well as in our stories—is less prescribed than tradition has led us to believe.” Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards
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As we double down on doble entendre, we might send painfully-observant birthday greetings to a man in whose repertoire puns sometimes figured, Lenny Bruce; he was born on this date in 1925. A comedian, social critic, and satirist, he was ranked (in a 2017 Roling Stone poll) the third best stand-up comic of all time– behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin, both of whom credit Bruce as an influence.
“The American Constitution was not written to protect criminals; it was written to protect the government from becoming criminals.”- Lenny Bruce
“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down”*…
It’s that time of year again: the 2025 IgNobel Awards have been awarded. Jennifer Ouellette reports…
Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes… when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website…
Read on for accounts (each both amusing and fascinating) of this year’s winners: “Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners,” @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social in @arstechnica.com.
More at the web site of Improbable Research— “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK”– the organization behind the IgNobels.
* Adam Savage (@asavage.bsky.social)
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As we have some serious fun, we might we might spare a thought for a man who embodied the marriage of science and glee: Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead”*…
Mark Frauenfelder surfaces a 1978 review from the marvelous Clive James…
In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.”…
… Here’s an excerpt from the biography:
The plenum once again proved convincingly the CPSU’s monolithic unity, its stand on Leninist principles, and its political maturity. It demonstrated the fidelity of the Party and its Central Committee to Marxism-Leninism and expressed the unswerving determination of Communists to adhere to and develop steadfastly the Leninist standards of Party life and the principles of Party leadership, notably that of collective leadership, and boldly and resolutely to set aside every impediment to the creative work of Party and people...
“A review of the most boring book in the world,” from @boingboing.net.
And for the masochists among us: the full text of the biography.
* Clive James, from the review
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As we tackle tedium, we might spare a thought for a spiritual forebearer of James: Samuel Johnson; he was born on this date in 1709. A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, Johnson’s best-known work was surely A Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1755, after nine years work– and which served as the standard for 150 years (until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary [see the almanac entry in the “Clive James” link above]). That said, Dr. Johnson, as he was known, is probably best remembered as the subject of what Walter Jackson Bate called “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
But Johnson was, in his time, also a famous aphorist– the very opposite of a man he described to Boswell in 1784: “He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others”– a role he often played as an influential critic…
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Dr. Johnson
“We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh”*…
Emily Herring on Henri Bergson and the importance of laughter…
… Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much thought. The pre-Socratic thinker Democritus was nicknamed the ‘laughing philosopher’ for espousing cheerfulness as a way of life. However, we know more about his thoughts on atomism than on laughter. Similarly, the section of Aristotle’s Poetics that dealt with comedy hasn’t come down to us. Other major thinkers who have offered passing, often humourless, reflections about humour include Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, who believed that we laugh because we feel superior; Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer who argued that comedy stems from a sense of incongruity; and Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud who suggested that comedians provide a form of much-needed relief (from, respectively, ‘nervous energy’ and repressed emotions). Bergson was unconvinced by these accounts. He believed that the problem of laughter deserved more than a few well-worded digressions. Although his theory retained elements of the incongruity and superiority theories of humour, it also opened entirely new perspectives on the problem…
… Why did a philosopher of such renown deviate from his more traditional and serious philosophical obsessions – the nature of time, memory, perception, free will and the mind-body problem – to focus on the apparently frivolous case-studies of slapstick, vaudeville and word play? And what was there to be gained from such analysis? The topic was a ticklish one. Laughter, wrote Bergson, had ‘a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation’. It was almost as though there was something unnatural about subjecting one of the most pleasurable and ubiquitous human experiences to dry philosophical speculation…
… He believed that laughter should be studied as ‘a living thing’ and treated ‘with the respect due to life’. His investigation was therefore more like that of a field zoologist observing frogs in the wild:
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition … We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.
Like all good metaphorical field zoologists, Bergson started his study by familiarising himself with his metaphorical frog’s natural habitat: in other words, the conditions under which laughter is most likely to appear and thrive. Following this method, Bergson arrived at three general observations.
The first one, according to Bergson, was so ‘important’ and ‘simple’ that he was surprised it hadn’t attracted more attention from philosophers: ‘The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.’ When Bergson wrote these words, he couldn’t have foreseen that, a century later, through the power of the internet, one of the most popular forms of comedy would be provided by our own pets in the form of viral videos, memes and gifs. But, in a way, he anticipated it in what he wrote about laughter directed at non-humans:
You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression…
… Bergson’s second observation might appear counterintuitive to anyone who has been reduced to tears by a fit of uncontrollable giggles: ‘Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.’ But his point was that certain emotional states – pity, melancholy, rage, fear, etc – make it difficult for us to find the humour in things we might otherwise have laughed at (even anthropomorphic vegetables). We instinctively know that there are situations in which it is best to refrain from laughing. Those who choose to ignore these unspoken rules are immediately sanctioned…
… This is not to say that it’s impossible to laugh in times of hardship. In many cases, humour appears to serve as a coping mechanism in the face of tragedy or misfortune. In 1999, as he was being carried out of his house on a stretcher after a crazed fan stabbed him, the former Beatle George Harrison asked a newly hired employee: ‘So what do you think of the job so far?’ On his death bed, Voltaire allegedly told a priest who was exhorting him to renounce Satan: ‘This is no time for making new enemies.’ Following Bergson’s logic, perhaps in some cases humour is cathartic precisely because it forces us to look at things from a detached perspective.
Finally, laughter ‘appears to stand in need of an echo’, according to Bergson. Evolutionary theorists have hypothesised about the adaptive value of laughter, in particular in the context of social bonding. Laughter might have emerged as a prelinguistic signal of safety or belonging within a group. Laughter and humour continue to play an important role in our various social groups. Most countries, regions and cities share a wide repertoire of jokes at the expense of their neighbours. For example, this Belgian dig at my compatriots, the French: ‘After God created France, he thought it was the most beautiful country in the world. People were going to get jealous, so to make things fair he decided to create the French.’
Jokes need not be nationalistic or even derogatory in nature to facilitate social bonding. Most friends share ‘in-jokes’ that are meant to be understood only within the context of their particular social group, as do certain communities brought together by a football team, political opinions or shared specialist knowledge (‘Why are obtuse angles so depressed? Because they’re never right’). Our laughter ‘is always the laughter of a group’, as Bergson put it. Even in those cases when we are effectively laughing alone, to, or perhaps at ourselves, laughter always presupposes an imagined audience or community.
Bergson’s observations tell us where to find laughter, under which conditions it is possible for laughter to emerge, but they don’t tell us why we laugh. They do nonetheless provide us with important clues. It is no accident that we laugh exclusively at other humans, and that laughter is a communal experience: its purpose, or ‘function’, wrote Bergson, is social. In addition, it isn’t by chance that laughter requires a temporary shutdown of our emotions: though pleasurable, laughter is above all punitive. But what, or whom, is laughter punishing, and how does it do that?
Read on to find out how Bergson reached his conclusion that laughter solves a serious human conundrum– how to keep our minds and social lives elastic: “Laughter Is Vital,” from @emilyherring.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
For those finding it difficult to laugh in these troubled times, see this piece on the pessimisitic Schopenhauer‘s conoisseurship of very distinctive kinds of happiness: “The semi-satisfied life.”
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As we chortle, we might send smiling birthday greetings to Ramón Valdés; he was born on this date in 1924. An actor and comedian, he is best known for the character he made iconic: “Don Ramón” in El Chavo del Ocho, a hugely-successful Mexican sitcom that aired for 8 seasons (31 episodes) across Latin America and in Spain.
“A good name is rather to be chosen than riches”*
From Gregory Ross and his lovely blog Futility Closet…
Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:
- Bates Motel
- Disco Inferno
- Up Your Assets
- Race Horse
- Crashing Bore
- English Muffin
- Leo Pity Me
- Cold Shower
- T.V. Doubletalk
- Ranikaboo
- Holy Cats
- Hadn’t Orter
- Strong Strong
- Honeybunny Boo
After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”
This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:
(Thorouhbred racing remains a controversial endeavor. Whenever a racing accident severely injures a well-known horse, such as the major leg fractures that led to the euthanization of 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, or 2008 Kentucky Derby runner-up Eight Belles, animal rights groups have denounced the Thoroughbred racing industry. On the other hand, advocates of racing argue that without horse racing, far less funding and incentives would be available for medical and biomechanical research on horses. They note that though horse racing is hazardous, veterinary science has advanced. Previously hopeless cases can now be treated, and earlier detection through advanced imaging techniques like scintigraphy can keep at-risk horses off the track. Still, the argument continues.
More fundamentally, there is a class divide at the root of the sport: racehorse owners are largely the wealthy; “railbirds”– those who bet on the sport– largely working class.)
* Proverbs 22:1 (usually attributed to Solomon)
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As noodle on nomenclature, we might recall tah it was on this date in 1896 that Paulding Farnham of Tiffany & Co. begona work on a commission to create a silver cup to be awarded to the winner of the Belmont Stakes (the third leg of the Triple Crown).
It was commissioned by August Belmont Jr., in memory of his late father August Belmont, the namesake of the Belmont Stakes. Farnham used 350 ounces of sterling silver to craft a 27-inch high, 30-pound acorn-shaped bowl supported by a pedestal composed of three Thoroughbred horse statues representing the foundation stallions Eclipse, Matchem, and Herod. The bowl was 15 inches across and 14 inches at the base and had a prominent acorn and oak motif symbolizing the development of modern racing Thoroughbreds from those three foundation sires. The lid was crowned with a statue of the elder Belmont’s racehorse Fenian who secured Belmont’s first win in the Belmont Stakes in 1869.
The cup cost $1,000 to create and augmented the $4,000 in prize money given to the race winner. In the event, August Belmont, Jr. himself won the Cup when his horse Hastings won the race.
The burden of parting with such a creation– more and more costly over the years was such that, from 1908, winners are presented the permanent trophy for ceremonial purposes only, the winning owner of the Belmont Stakes receives a smaller replica of the trophy to keep. The winning trainer and jockey are also presented with (even smaller) replicas, while the winning groom is given a statuette to commemorate the victory.
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