A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  (For anyone reading this in the distant future, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé were two basically amiable carbon-based life-forms who were very good at making mouth-sounds and for some reason everyone felt the need to talk about them ALL THE TIME. (Those Earthling meatsacks, am I right??) Also, hi, future reader! What’s an advanced life-form like you doing with a book like this? If you are near humans, please don’t hunt them and convert their parts into scrap!)

  Without the headline as a pun dumping ground, I had to console myself by hunting down the pun in literature and history and spreading the Good News, with the kind of nervous tenacity generally reserved for people who want to give religion to you or get drugs from you.

  “Jesus used to make lots of puns,” I told people on the bus. “That was how you could tell he had tremendous personal magnetism. He went up to Peter and said, ‘From now on, your name will be ‘Rock,’ because on this ‘Rock’ I build my church!’ And Peter actually followed him, instead of groaning and running away!”

  “That’s nice.”

  “You want miracles? That’s a miracle right there!”

  “Oh look, here’s my stop,” my seat partners would say, getting off at a deserted reservoir several miles from any parked cars or people.

  “Jesus also had a great one about how ‘you are fishermen now, but I will make you fishers OF men’ that you really have to hear in the original Greek to get the full flavor of!” I yelled cheerily as the doors closed.

  Of course, people punned long before Jesus. Aristophanes was way into puns, doing clever and untranslatable things with “proktos” (butt) and “protos” (first). Cleopatra made a famous pun to cheer up her lover Mark Antony after their troops lost the town of Toryne to Emperor Augustus. Toryne means “ladle.” “What danger can there be from a ladle falling into his hands?” she asked. Ha-HA!

  I look forward to cheering up a lover in a similar way. I know a lot of puns about disease, so I am well-fortified against any possible bad news. “Hip dysplasia?” I will say. “That must displease-ya!” “Yes we cancer!” “Acute appendicitis? I think it’s just okay-looking.” “Lou Gehrig’s Disease? Sorry, uh, that—you’re on your own there.”

  And history had plenty more. “Not Angles, but Angels!” said Pope Gregory, seeing some Angles for the first time. “Oh no,” the Angles said. “Oh God. Leave.” (They also said this for unrelated reasons.)

  Aside from spreading the Good News, I tried to work puns into my daily life, with mixed results. Even when things got serious, I couldn’t stop. “I see your father’s retiring,” a coworker told me.

  “Well,” I said, “he’s always been pretty retiring.”

  Groan.

  Story of my life.

  • • •

  And then I discovered the O.Henry Pun-Off.

  Every week, as part of my duties at the Post, I host a chat, which mostly consists of my talking to strangers about bacon and fending off the advances of one man with a Philly IP address who wants to know if I’ve gotten my “birthday spanking” yet. Noting my fondness for puns, they suggested that I try the Pun-Off, and in May of 2012, I did.

  I had been traveling a fair bit that year—Iowa! South Carolina!—but I was instantly enchanted by Austin. I had never been to Texas before, and I thought that everything there was going to be cartoonishly large. I would get off the plane and all the road signs would be large enough to swat a mammoth with. All the mosquitoes would be the size of butterflies. Butterflies would be the size of hardcover books. There would be a big beltway comprised entirely of large Bibles. Everyone would have jangling spurs and go swaggering around leading giant blue oxen behind them.

  But instead there was just a bit of traffic from the airport, a couple of clean-looking, well-lighted strip clubs, a giant park full of food trailers hung with fairy lights, and some buildings that resembled big crayons. If your idea of Heaven is anything like my idea of Heaven—which is to say, lots of weirdos, corn dogs, and cheap beer—Austin is the place for you.

  The O.Henry Pun-Off was preceded by dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Opal Divine’s. I sat down at the table and instantly felt at home. On the table was a whole worksheet of Punny Names for Cocktails. It was just like Pun and Games all over again. “Your neckwear.” Mai Thai. “Citizen of the galaxy”? Cosmo-politan.

  I was as prepared on the subject of puns as I was ill-equipped when it came to O.Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter. All I had read of O.Henry was “The Gift of the Magi,” a short story about why you should never go out of your way to give somebody a thoughtful gift. “William Sydney Porter is buried in North Carolina,” said one of my dinner companions, a man with a mustache who resembled a worried moon.

  “Great!” I said. “Is O.Henry buried nearby?”

  He laughed as though I had made a hilarious joke, and I realized my mistake.

  First came the tribute to the punster of the year, then everyone got up and told stories with pun punch lines, then the MC brought in a bin of objects and we all lined up to make puns on them. It was heaven.

  “Being a punster can be hard,” one contestant confided. “Someone told me his wife had a stroke and I said, ‘That’s terrible! Three strokes, you’re out!’ and he didn’t think it was funny.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “Story of my life,” I said.

  • • •

  Kurt Vonnegut coined the term “karass” in Cat’s Cradle—it means, basically, people who are on your kickball team at life. Punsters were my karass. We kept the party going at the birthday festivities for the friend of Miranda, another punster. She was one of those perfect-looking smart people who speak literally six languages and have beautifully toned upper arms. We wound up at a hip downtown bar and started punning on lightbulbs while her friends looked on in commingled delight and horror. “I’m sick of this topic. Let’s switch.” “Does someone have a mint? I’d like to fill a mint.” “Did you hear about that cannibal inventor of the lightbulb? Yeah, Thomas Alva Et His Son!” (I didn’t say they were good puns, just that they happened.)

  I felt like I was home.

  • • •

  The next day was the actual competition. The format of the Pun-Off is simple. There is the long-form, prepared Punniest in Show—a run of puns lasting no more than two minutes on a topic of your own choosing—and Punslingers, a grueling several hours of competitive wordplay that pits one punster against another on a randomly chosen topic like “Celebrity names as questions!”

  “Do you know where Shelley Winters?”

  “Is it okay to Pat Sajak?”

  “Is Terry Gross?”

  Repeat one, and you get a strike. Make a dubious pun that isn’t a pun but a play on words, you get a strike. Fail to come up with one in three seconds, and you’re out. It takes all afternoon. It’s serious business. You can spend months training, if you want to, and some people want to. Don’t bring a life to a pun fight.

  For my two minutes of prepared material, I had decided to make puns about philosophers. At the last minute, I suddenly panicked that people might not know all the philosophers to whom I was referring and decided to print out a series of paper slides identifying them.

  This resulted less in “greater clarity for the audience” than in “lots and lots of philosophers flying off into the wind, never to be retrieved.” Still, it had its moments.

  “I need to stop drinking with philosophers,” I started. “. . . I always wind up getting illogically propositioned. . . . Paris Hilton was pretty drunk. You should have seen that heiress tottle (Aristotle) . . . I always Schopenhauer later than I’m supposed to . . . It was one of those bars where I don’t think Descartes anybody.”

  It was all like that, better in parts and worse in parts. I think I came at it from a lot of good Engels and left Marx on the judges’ memory. They said to one another, yeah, Heidegger.

  (DO YOU SEE WHAT I’M
SAYING? IT COULD BE LIKE THIS, IN YOUR MIND, ALL THE TIME.)

  Even with the wind taking the great thinkers away, I still came in fourth overall. The guy who had told me the thing about “three strokes, you’re out” reassured me that this was a very solid performance, and as high as he’d ever placed.

  I was elated.

  Then came the Punslingers.

  I got eliminated pretty quickly, mainly because I ran out of units of distance. (“King’s arm?” I tried.)

  But then I got to sit back and enjoy. It is no exaggeration to say that watching the Punslingers competition was a magical, transcendent experience. It was a boxing match. It was a concert. It was two people sparring and dancing together and making something beautiful. It was opera, in the sense that it went on and on and on and most people would consider it torture.

  It was like seeing the face of God, if your idea of the face of God is twelve solid minutes of farm puns.

  “Holy Plow!”

  “There was a lady contestant in this, but we had to bumper.”

  “Sow?”

  “Well, come on, reap between the lines.”

  “I have a lot of plants in the audience.”

  “Somebody bale me out of this!”

  “Hay!”

  “A dog won’t help you farm, but a cattle.”

  “That pun was an udder disgrace.”

  And so on.

  For me, this was heaven. For you, this might be somewhere on the scale next to waterboarding or attending someone’s child’s recital.

  I didn’t want it to end. Fortunately, there was an afterparty where I signed up for everyone’s mailing lists of daily puns. The celebration continued well into the morning.

  I boarded the elevator at the Airport Howard Johnson (as a general rule, if you are a hotel and your main selling point is your proximity to the airport, you are not a nice hotel) with a spring in my step and a smile on my face.

  There is a certain undeniable camaraderie to hotel elevators at four in the morning. We’ve all done something that got us there.

  The elevator smelled like a Febrezed ashtray. Its other occupant was wearing a too-short dress and too-tall strappy shoes in a yellowish color. The dress fabric looked like something you would regret upholstering your couch in. “Hey!” I said. We sort of gave each other the Howard Johnson four forty-five a.m. elevator once-over. “Hey!” she said.

  “Living the dream!” I said.

  I understand that there is a certain irony in shouting “Living the dream!” to the other occupant of the Airport Howard Johnson elevator, but in my case it was true, or as close to being true as you ever get with realized dreams. I really was.

  She fiddled with her black, stringy hair. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  There was the real world I remembered.

  • • •

  I had to come back.

  Next year, I’d have a plan.

  The 2012 champion and I had agreed that the way to go next year would be some limited, elaborate category of puns with a lot of weird syllables in it that the judges would know.

  When we arrived at the 2013 competition, we discovered that we had both picked the same category: books of the Bible.

  Fortunately, I went before he did, and also fortunately, I was doing mine in order, which offered a certain advantage. He later told the Wall Street Journal that he could not defend the title his second year because “It’s like a band’s second album . . . You start getting into the experimental material.”

  “Baby, I want to get biblical with you,” I told the audience, launching into a series of puns on books of the Bible in order. (“Remember when they threw the Republican nominee into that pit of freezing grizzlies? I hated seeing what those NUMBERS DEUTEROMNEY.”) I got thirty-nine points out of a possible forty, tying with the pun legend Zeb (he’d placed third the past year, and had been a Punslingers champion), who had a routine about spices entitled “Seasonings of Love.” It came down to a clap-off. He won, but I was thrilled with my performance.

  Then came Punslingers. And instead of just watching, I somehow made it all the way to the final four. All I can say is that the spirit was on me.

  It didn’t hurt that “religion” was a category and I could go straight back into my routine. (“Look Obadiah!”)

  By the time we got to diseases, I was at a fever pitch. It turned into a slugfest. (“I feel really bad for DiCaprio. PO-LIO.”) We went all the way from the politically correct diseases into the iffier ones. It got hairy at points. Finally I couldn’t think of one more. I conceded with a last pun on SIDS.

  At the end of it all, the other punsters gave me the Most Viable punster award. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was a punster! And I was viable! I had earned the respect of my wordy peers!

  It was the first time I’d won anything in years and, clutching it in a teddy-bear-vise-grip everywhere I went, I began to realize how much I’d missed that. Real life offers sadly few opportunities to win things. There are moments that feel like winning—getting a job, say, or getting married. But then you have to live with another person and cannot ever again poop with the door open.

  • • •

  I accepted that this would be as far as it went for me. It was clearly my pun zenith. It felt like enough. I didn’t want to be like Michael Phelps, going back to the Olympics every four years until he was wrinklier out of the water than in it, each time emerging from the pool with diminishing returns. I wanted to walk away when I was still viable. This year I was just going to have fun and try to make some quality puns and not care what the judges had to say.

  But then the cameras came around.

  • • •

  Before the most recent Pun-Off, I got an e-mail from a producer at CBS Morning News who wanted to do a feature on the competition. He’d stumbled across a piece I’d written about it after my first year there, watched my philosopher puns, and wondered if I were still planning to compete. If so, did I mind being followed around by cameras for a bit during the run-up to the event?

  Mind? I asked. You say that like this is not the dream of every child in our fame-obsessed post-Warhol era. Sometimes I drive through speed traps just to feel like someone’s taken notice. You should see how I carry on when I get into the field of view of a convenience-store security camera. I start picking feuds and forming alliances within seconds. MIND? Sometimes I’ll pick up a landline phone and gently whisper “Hey how about that terrorism act we were planning to commit I am the true Natalee Holloway killer” just to get that sweet feeling that someone’s listening.

  Soon a friendly lady with a camera showed up at my office. “Just do what you normally do,” she said.

  Instantly I started panicking. What do I do? I thought. What is my routine? Do I have a routine?

  Sometimes I stare at the wall for a while. “The thing a writer’s wife can never understand,” someone once said, “is that when a writer is staring out the window, he is working.”

  I would have stared out a window if I had a window. Instead, I stared at the windows I had open on my computer. Frantically, I minimized most of them. Fortunately I have years of practice minimizing windows. I’m the fastest click-out’er in the West. You try reading Lord of the Rings fanfiction on your family computer and see how fast you get!

  I opened a Word document and frowned at it.

  Most of my writing process consists of typing things like “UGH SO THIS IS A THING APPARENTLY.

  UM

  SO APPARENTLY [PUT SOMETHING HERE] AND NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH

  OKAY SO

  SO

  HI

  UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

  THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE

  I DON’T KNOW

  [PUT SOMETHING HERE]”

  In movies and TV shows, people try to dramatize the process of writing, but the most dramatic it g
ets is sometimes I go to the vending machine and get a bag of beef jerky, and then I drop a piece on the floor immediately after getting back to my chair, and then I glance quickly over at my coworker to see if he has noticed, and then I pick it up and eat it. It’s not exactly Shakespeare in Love territory.

  Sometimes I’ll leave someone an apologetic-sounding voice mail, but I don’t even really do that anymore.

  Frantically I tried to think what someone impressive with a totally nonembarrassing routine that was ready to be put on TV this instant would do. An Impressive Person would probably read the Economist and the New Yorker and chuckle wryly at the cartoons. “The economist,” I typed. “Dot com.” (This is not, it turns out, the actual Web site of the Economist, which is something that Alternate Universe Put-Together Me would have known.)

  The other trouble with typing “The Economist” into my computer is that I haven’t cleared my browser history in the Internet equivalent of hundreds of years. Autofill is like a golden retriever: very excited to bring you what it thinks you want and totally clueless that sometimes a modicum of discretion might be called for. Just a modicum. It saw me typing “E,” got all excited and wanted to offer me “erotic fanart of Rick Santorum” or “erotica with Mitt Romney in it” or “erotica without Mitt Romney in it this is for research for an article I swear anyone who is monitoring my network usage hi guy who monitors the network usage.”

  I couldn’t very well delete my browser history with the camera running, I thought. Besides, some of those sites had been hard to find!

  I glanced around my desk. Maybe I could find something impressive on the desk. Maybe there was an uncompleted New York Times Saturday Crossword that I could fill out rapidly in pen. Maybe there were a couple of back copies of the New Yorker or a large set of encyclopedias that I could pick up and say, “Ah, splenetic! Just where I left off! So many twists in these pages! After sphincter, I didn’t know what was coming!”

  I frowned at my bookshelf. There was the Justin Bieber autobiography. There was Snooki’s novel A Shore Thing. There was a picture and article about the World’s Oldest Postal Employee. “I’m pretty healthy. I eat onion sandwiches,” the pull quote read. There was a picture of the president of Haiti dressed in a diaper. There was a Venn Diagram of Things Rick Perry says. There were half a dozen books about the Civil War, several irate letters from readers, one of which began with the all-caps declarative sentence “WHAT’S THE MATTER, EVE? CAN’T TAKE A RIB?” which was, I guess, a pun, and some half-eaten food that a guy from a neighboring office had brought me in what I feared might be an effort to court me. (I tried gently explaining that bringing someone food you have already taken large bites out of was not how human courtship worked and that “you know, Carl, if I were a dog or a wren, this might be impressive and touching, but as it is it just makes me worry that you don’t know what species I belong to or haven’t dated human females in the past.”) There was a petri dish Christmas tree ornament that someone had sent me on learning my last name. There was a tiny stuffed Chewbacca (also a gift from a reader). There was a volume of Family Circus cartoons, still in the original bag.