If you’re not sure your kid is amassing enough virtue just sitting at home studying for six to eight AP’s, you can always send Junior off on a children’s crusade to wage holy battles abroad. Access to lepers is preferable.
There are some doubters and heretics who don’t believe in life after high school, of course. But everyone else picks up a backpack burden and makes his pilgrim’s progress through the Slough of Deadlines and the Vanity College Fair as best he can. Then, senior fall, he stands at the gate, hearing his virtues and sins read off, trying to figure out where to get a letter of recommendation to enter the Celestial University. (Wow, Pilgrim’s Progress–based puns don’t really pay off, huh? Hi, one old man just outside Phoenix laughing hysterically, alone. I’m sorry, everyone else.)
“What about all these church activities?” our college counselor asked, looking at my sheet.
I had more church activities than you would expect, which is to say, I was still engaged in any church activities at all. Youth Group had disbanded a while ago, but I was still lurking around. There were free doughnuts, and I needed something to do during the hour before children’s choir practice. I was no longer, strictly speaking, a child, but the choir director was desperate to keep me because I was one of two members of the choir who did not cry and try to eat the sheet music. The other one was the choir director’s son. And his voice was changing, a fact that she refused to acknowledge and that made us especially pleasant to listen to. It was a little embarrassing to be the only person in the choir taller than four feet, but the alternative, Mrs. Harris assured me, was too horrible to contemplate. They would have to switch entirely to handbells.
To pass the time before practice, I offered to teach Sunday school. This was a sort of futuristic Montessori hybrid Sunday school where you were supposed to let the children discover Jesus on their own initiative. My function was to sit at the edge of the room and look encouraging. In order to do this, I had to attend several training sessions. During one of these sessions the woman instructing us accidentally dropped a small toy Jesus that was made out of wood. Then she apologized to it.
After this I decided that maybe Sunday school teaching was not my line.
“Do you think you could get one of these people to write you a recommendation?” our school’s college counselor asked.
I shrugged. “I could try.”
This was how I wound up with a letter of recommendation from our church deacon that started, “Ever since I saw Alexandra take on the role of Jesus, I have been convinced that she would be a good fit for your university.” I didn’t really think my Jesus had been that memorable, but when Deacon Jane got going, she really got going. Apparently I had been the Golden Jesus Standard by which all others were to be measured. The admissions department would be lucky if I didn’t get taken up into the sky on a trailing cloud of glory before their letter reached me. Such was my commitment to the role that I was probably out right now tending to a leper.
• • •
I frowned at it. Applying to college tends to make you question your motives anyway. Here you had thought you were just studying Ancient Greek because you wanted to know Ancient Greek or being Jesus in a church pageant because, well, someone had to be Jesus in your church pageant. But it turned out that college had been lurking at the back of your mind all along, hadn’t it? Were you being good because you wanted to be good? Or were you being good because you hoped that you’d be rewarded? You were just as bad as the meek, sidling around being meek all the time just so they could inherit the earth away from the rest of us. Those sneaks.
It was a catch-22. The trouble was that the best way to fake genuine enthusiasm was to be genuinely enthusiastic. But then were you trapped in a long con? Were you genuinely enthusiastic because you knew that this was the best way to get what you wanted? So that you could say, “No, I’m real, not like the others. I don’t care about the point value! I’m not grubbing for indulgences.”
It was the sort of thing that probably kept John Calvin awake at night.
Why was I walking around trying to impersonate Jesus, anyway?
I began to feel some serious doubt. I couldn’t be an atheist. I don’t like lots of bumper stickers. I couldn’t be an agnostic. I don’t like admitting there are things I don’t know. What did that leave? What was I supposed to do?
At least for college, my suspicious Jesus activity had its intended effect.
Like Heaven, college is a consequence-free zone full of robes. It does’t prepare you for life. It barely prepares you for the workforce. College actively makes you less fit for most jobs than you were during high school. You stop being required to show up in places at specific times, a skill that is useful for adults to have. Instead, you develop an uncanny ability to cook noodles in settings where, frankly, you should not be cooking anything. The workforce needs you to be able to do basic math? Nuts to you, workforce! Here is a course called “How to Befriend a Number” that counts toward your math requirement. (Seriously. I once took a science course called “Nanothings,” whose entire message was, I quote, “Small things are different.” For my final project, I wrote a play about a ray of light that could not decide if he were a particle or a wave.) The workforce wants you to be able to arrive at work at nine a.m.? Oh, Workforce, that’s cute. At college we learn to say the phrase “I do most of my best work after one a.m.” with actual conviction. Why not? There is seldom class before noon, if you pick the right major.
And then it turns out there’s a Beyond after all, outside the gates. And this time, you’re completely unprepared.
So forget life after death. I’m barely figuring out life after college.
Maybe I should get a monk to follow me around, though. Just in case.
Your Prize Came
When I got to the mailbox and opened it up, I was startled to find that it contained nothing but trophy after trophy. And they were for you! See, trophies did not cease being awarded when you turned eight and stopped playing soccer. You’ve been secretly getting them all your life! They just had the wrong address for you.
Your prizes finally came for:
Letting it go
Not telling a story even though you had a really good story that was going to blow everyone out of the water because it was clear the evening was winding down at that point
Letting that lady into your lane
Intending to give up your seat on the bus but then somebody else did but still you totally would have
Arriving at brunch on time
Offering everyone your gum even though that meant you went from a whole pack to no gum in a few seconds
Writing that thank-you note
Having only one drink and sipping water the rest of the evening
Exercising
Actually not telling the secret you promised not to tell, but not (as usual) because you forgot what the secret was
Thinking nonjudgmental thoughts about that mother on the bus whose baby kept crying and crying and crying the whole way
Being right on the Internet
Going to your friend’s improv show
Being a good loser
Breaking up in person
Taking out the trash
Finishing Proust’s entire In Search of Lost Time
Finishing Proust’s entire In Search of Lost Time and NOT bringing it up every chance you get, which shows real restraint
Buying, cooking, and eating a vegetable
Ordering salad
Cleaning the bathroom
Stepping on that cockroach for your roommates while they screamed and screamed
Putting that spider under a glass and letting it out very carefully
Filing your income taxes
Fixing your parents’ computer
Fixing your parents’ computer that other time
Wak
ing up early
RSVP’ing
Holding the door
Not holding the revolving door
Taking a taxi to the airport with that credit card your friend left in a bar so she was able to get on her plane and go to a job interview
Cooking her that dinner
Listening to your friend hem and haw and agonize and carry on about this guy she’s seeing who might be right but might also just be her idea of what’s right but how can you really know and what’s love anyway and is that the last beer do you mind if she has another beer?
Doing the dishes
Cleaning up after yourself
Not crying
Crying
They all came here and they are waiting for you. Let me know where to send them, and I will.
The Naked Pun
Being the world champion of something isn’t usually an instant social liability.
When Miss America arrives at your dinner table, you don’t sigh and throw up your hands and say, “Great! Now she’s going to smile and change into an evening gown, and our whole evening is ruined!” Actually, quite the opposite. When another guest confides that she is a member of the World Champion luge team, no one expects her to begin luging then and there. (Besides the simple fact that it would be rude, it would require a lot of specialized equipment that it is hard to carry with you to parties.)
Not so with punning.
Saying that you are a champion punster is like announcing that you are a world-class leper. “Oh,” everyone says, giving you a look as though you have just casually dropped an ear into the bean dip. “Well, congratulations,” they add, in a tone usually associated with the phrase “You should probably get that checked out.”
“Thank you,” you say.
“Well, do you want to make some puns for us, or what?” someone says, and everyone else glowers at him.
Punning is not a skill, their gimlet glances seem to say. Punning is a condition. Punsters should be treated gently, with kid gloves, and you should give them that firm, polite, too-bright smile that these same people give when walking their children past cup-shakers on the sidewalk. “Don’t look away,” you can hear them murmuring, “but don’t stop, either. On no account stop.”
And as long as we’re being honest, these people may well have a point.
It’s a disease. We can’t help it.
Punning is a kind of Midas Touch. Everything you touch turns to puns, even if all you really want to do is eat a sandwich in peace and quiet:
“We would enjoy this sandwich, if you’d lettuce.”
“You mayo.”
“I’m not the one getting jalapeño face about it.”
“Give me some time to ketchup.”
“But I just mustard a lot of good puns!”
“Stop it! Just stop it!”
“Oh, ‘just top it!’ Good one!”
It’s like nuclear escalation. You can’t stop before the other guy does, or there’ll be fallout. (That wasn’t actually a pun, but it was close.)
Fran Lebowitz said that the opposite of talking isn’t listening—the opposite of talking is waiting. For punsters, the opposite of talking is waiting to make a pun.
Just recently, I was having a perfectly nice brunch when someone said, “I love lychee,” and with horror I heard myself saying, “I Love Lychee was my favorite 1950s sitcom.”
“Whyyyy?” everyone groaned, and I shrugged and shrank down in the chair and tried to explain that it wasn’t me; it was the condition.
It is the condition. It’s a sickness. It’s a disease.
My favorite quote about punning is from Stephen Leacock, who noted, “The inveterate punster follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.”
If so, this explains why sharks have so few chums.
(You see?)
Hearing nothing, understanding nothing, waiting only to make a meal of a carelessly dropped word, the punster follows, dogged and ineluctable in his pursuit, like Captain Ahab but leggier.
And now I’ve got the badge to prove it. Well, the trophy. Well, three trophies, if we’re staring at my rack.
I wasn’t born with it. It isn’t a thing you’re born with, like a silver spoon or a caul or synesthesia (I wish I had synesthesia! Right now, if I want to taste the rainbow, I have to buy a bag of Skittles) or a cool mutation that allows you to light things on fire with your thoughts. It’s learned.
I know when I learned it, too. My parents, worried that I might become popular at school, got me a book of puns at an impressionable age.
It worked like a charm. Puns were my anti-drug. They were my anti-social life. My social circle shrank to those who could tolerate long, rambling jokes that concluded with a triumphant “AND THAT’S WHY PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GRASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T STOW THRONES.” No chance of falling in with a bad crowd who would introduce me to Boys and Liquor and Jazz—but, hey, as the fern liked to say, with fronds like these, who needs anemones?
The book my parents gave me, Pun and Games by the eminent punster Richard Lederer, taught you how to take any conversation you were faced with and turn it into a pun. It was the wordplay equivalent of a manual on how to build bombs from common household materials. It came complete with sets of pun-problems for you to fill out with a pencil or pen.
There were lots of other wordplay games, too, like decoding vanity plates for various professions. NML 10DR was a zookeeper. 10SNE1 was a tennis pro. And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.
I learned about inflationary language, whereby “wonderful” became “twoderful” and “I don’t know what you ate that for” becomes “I don’t know what you nine that five.” It didn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t me, but so what? That was the story of my life.
I learned about Spoonerisms. William Archibald Spooner was an Oxford don who gained fame by inadvertently swapping around the beginnings of his words. “Three cheers for our queer old dean!” he once toasted, raising a glass to Queen Victoria. “Mardon me, Padam, you are occupewing my pie,” he told a lady at church. “May I sew you to another sheet?” During World War I he commented, “When the boys come back from France, we’ll have the hags flung out.”
He wasn’t useful in average conversation, but he was great if I ever got into a situation where a cutting retort was called for. “You,” I would sneer, “are what William Archibald Spooner would have called a shining wit.”
No one ever seemed to notice how biting this was. Again, this was the story of my life.
By the time I had worked my way through all the exercises, learning along the way that “the man who hated seabirds left no tern unstoned, while the talented masseuse left no stern untoned,” I was unstoppable.
I hadn’t been a shark before, but now my eyes were opened. I saw pun potential everywhere. I began to follow conversations, sniffing for blood in the water. It was like one of those hideous transformations in a superhero movie. I walked into my room a normal person, was bitten on the ankle by a radioactive punster, and came staggering out a monster, spewing puns everywhere I turned.
With great power came great power to annoy.
And this state of things persisted.
• • •
When I got to college, everything changed. One of the first friends I made was someone who said, “Did you hear about the lady who shaved her legs and rectum?”
I nodded, feeling that sudden hot sensation that floods through your body when you experience true love or sit on something sharp.
“That’s my mom’s favorite pun,” she said.
And then I knew I was in the right place. We went on to be roommates and write several shows together, and after that she became a famous person whose Facebook updates I have to keep Liking. No, I’m kidding; we’re still friends. I think. (Call me?)
College was a parall
el universe where punning was actually celebrated, in the form of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which I can best describe as a group for drinking, putting on an elaborate drag musical while drinking, and making puns while drinking. For a few halcyon years I breathed the rich, supersaturated air of people who could not see a word ending in “er” without tacking on “I hardly know ’er!” (To give you a sense of the level of wordplay involved, there was a show called “Acropolis Now” set in Ancient Greece, with a character named Hades Pantsaretight. I say “there was a show” like I didn’t cowrite it and take full responsibility for that pun.)
Then, gasping like a fish, I was decanted from college into the real world.
In real life there are few such safe spaces for puns. You cannot turn to someone during, say, an earthquake at your church and murmur, “Christ Church Parish? More like Christ Church Perish!” It just doesn’t get the reception you’d hope, like a disappointing wedding or [INSERT NAME OF YOUR CELL PROVIDER HERE!].
(You see what I’m talking about. It’s a disease.)
These days I work at a newspaper, where, in theory, there is plenty of room for puns. What are headlines, if not pun-Dumpsters? “WEINER HANGS OUT, EMBARRASSES CANDIDATE.”
But that was before the dark times. Before the Internet.
The Internet has given us punsters much—Twitter, for one—and I am grateful. But it has also paved over many of the pun’s time-honored stomping grounds. Newspaper headlines, which used to be safe spots where young puns could roam freely and graze at will, now have to be written to attract as much traffic as possible. A great headline pun, like “At Convention, Female Spiderman Spied Her Man” (okay, a passable pun) becomes “Six Unbelievable Tricks for Finding Love That Are Tangentially Related to Miley Cyrus in Some Way and Also Pornography! (Pornography)” or “This Article Made Me Cry for Six Reasons Beyoncé Beyoncé Beyoncé,” or no self-respecting search engine will ever point you toward it.
A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Page 8
