On Groaning at Puns

MY family and friends all groan when I make a pun. Probably yours do. Why? I like puns. Probably you do. Possibly most people like puns, at least in moderation. But it is the fashion now to brand them as ‘ the lowest form of wit ’ and to groan whenever one is made. If the people who groan created even infrequently examples of higher forms of wit, I should n’t, perhaps, complain. But they don’t. They groan at puns who never made an epigram.

Fortunately I have a friend who defies his family and heartens me to defy mine. One day he appeared in black-and-white sport shoes. I had on white-and-tan ones, which caused us to remark that his shoes were Holsteins and mine Guernseys.

‘I wonder,’ said I, ‘what would be the result if we left them in the same closet?’

‘Milking shoehorns,’ he replied.

Our combined families groaned.

I suppose it is possible that I am wrong, but I still think this is amusing. Which kind of pun it belongs to, though, I am not so certain. There are, of course, two kinds of puns — good puns and bad puns. Both are funny. Sometimes the latter are funnier — if the man who makes them knows they are bad. An unconsciously bad pun, like any other unconscious failure in the art world, is more to be pitied than scorned. Let it die on the silence, with no groans.

In the good old days of my favorite author, Artemus Ward, the pun was in high favor. So, to be sure, you reply, were mansard roofs, but I don’t see any necessary connection, nor shall I be lured into any remarks about attic wit. Artemus said you’d know his house in Brooklyn because it had a cupola and a mortgage on it. He also said that the pretty girls of Utah mostly married Young. Probably nobody now remembers his once-famous panorama, which he exhibited with appropriate and descriptive remarks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and London. Especially in London was it — like the grave of Shakespeare — a success. Artemus in London used an umbrella to point out the objects of interest in his pictures. (In Boston I think he used a fish pole.) When the curtain disclosed ‘the great desert at night,’ he said, ‘Indians occupy yonder mountains. Little Injuns may be seen in the distance trundling their war-hoops.’ Our naïve predecessors, on both sides of the Atlantic, did not groan. The simple creatures laughed. I must confess that I still do. I even smile a little when Artemus declares that ‘ the Mormon’s religion is singular and his wives are plural.’ As for his telegram to the California theatrical manager, judge honestly for yourself. Hearing that Artemus was planning a visit to the coast, the manager wired him: —

WHAT WILL YOU TAKE FOR FORTY NIGHTS IN SAN FRANCISCO?

The reply was immediate.

BRANDY AND WATER. A. WARD

Perhaps you say that is n’t a pun. At any rate, it is a reply of spirit.

Artemus, to be sure, did not rely exclusively or even chiefly on the pun for his humor. He used it sparingly, waiting till he had a very good or a very bad one. He could take his pun or leave it alone (which was more than he could do with some other things).

There is some justification for groaning at the punster who has no powers of resistance. Apparently he came into the modern world with the nineteenth century, so maybe he was a phenomenon of the machine age. Since all our other troubles are blamed on machinery, why not the incorrigible punster? This theory has to ignore the atrocious puns in Shakespeare, but it’s a poor theory which can’t ignore what does n’t fit it. At any rate, the eighteenth-century wits derived largely from those of the Restoration, and favored the epigram. They punned, but with logical pointedness, and only when their sense of style was satisfied. When Samuel Foote was asked, on his return from Ireland, if he’d been to Cork, he replied, ‘No, but I saw many drawings of it.’ (This has done duty on the stage ever since.) The great Dr. Johnson was not above punning, but he too managed to point his puns sharply. With the nineteenth century, however, punning became a habit, not an art, and men became hypnotized by similarity of syllables. The recorded witticisms of Theodore Hook, and his impromptu poems, are choked with puns that have neither the merit of style nor the humor of inevitable ingenuity. One of his nearer approaches to wit, if not to critical discernment, was his impromptu on the publication of ‘Prometheus Unbound.’

Hook contributed to John Bull, and perpetuated many of those farces which poured out upon the stage in the barren years of the early nineteenth century. Hood, of course, seized upon the pun as a humorous device in his poetry. The minor theatres, restrained by monopoly from presenting the ‘legitimate’ drama, took refuge in what we should now call reviews, and the pun flourished to an incredible extent. The authors tried to give two meanings to words which did n’t have one! The contagion spread across the Atlantic, and, like a germ in a new culture, grew even more virulent. One of the most successful burlesques ever produced in America was John Brougham’s Pocahontas, acted first in 1855 and hundreds of times thereafter. It served a useful purpose, too, for it made ridiculous the romantic dramas about the noble red man, then prospering with Metamora, Edwin Forrest’s prize play, as their leader. But if you will take the trouble to read Pocahontas you will find it almost unbelievable doggerel in which the puns explode sometimes two or three to the line. Captain John Smith has been to visit Powhatan, and reports: —

And so it goes. Yet our ancestors did not groan. Here, and in England, they endured — nay, they enjoyed — a barrage of mechanical puns from stage and platform and press till the nineteenth century was well past its meridian. Tom Taylor in England, Oliver Wendell Holmes here, not only escaped public wrath, but waxed in purse and reputation. Even the great Gilbert, in his early days, was guilty.

But those days are happily past. The drama found something more important to do than punning, and humor once more took on the edge of style. In the nineties the epigram was rediscovered, and raged furiously (or shall we say Wildely). The pun ceased to be a weapon of humor either on the stage or on the printed page, and at some undefined date the custom of groaning arose when a belated Victorian made a play on words. As one who is sometimes consulted regarding subjects for ‘research’ in the pursuit of a Ph. D. degree, I recommend a thesis on the rise and fall of the pun, with special reference to the first groans. It might contain much of social history, and not a little humor. But, alas! I suppose the latter fact quite debars it from consideration. Humor in a Ph. D. thesis would be as out of place as a coonskin coat in Timbuctoo or a bond salesman on my doorstep.

To-day, in America, neither the pun nor the epigram is the mark of wit, but the wise-crack. A wise-crack is an epigram boiled eight minutes. That is why it often hurts when it hits. But there are belated punsters, pure amateurs who do not have to make a living or a reputation by twisting words, and hence employ their harmless gift as happy artists, when the mood and the occasion justify it. Groan at them as you will, they are not to be discouraged, and find solace in each other’s appreciation, or even in their own silent satisfaction at a pun well turned.

The other day, with such a one, I traveled on the Harlem railroad. The train presently paused at the station of Wassaic, where a woman stood on the platform holding a bunch of roses. My companion, turning to me with the gleam of creation in his eye, exclaimed, ‘Wassaic with flowers!’

I did not groan. But of course you are privileged to, if that’s the way you feel.

WALTER PRICHARD EATON