A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  I went into tour-guide mode.

  “This man,” I said, pointing to the Oldest Postal Employee, “eats onion sandwiches.” I scanned the pull quote. “Keeps him pretty fit, he says.” I flailed around for something else to say. “Oh look, a picture of Oscar Wilde!” I added. “As someone once said, ‘Oscar and George Bernard cannot be reconciled. When I’m wild about Shaw, I’m not Shaw about Wilde!’”

  “What?” said the video journalist.

  I sighed inwardly. “Oscar and George Bernard,” I began again, somewhat limply, “cannot be reconciled. When I’m . . .”

  After I had described every item on my desk, in some cases reading aloud from it, spun around in my chair a couple of times, and discovered an old laptop that I had been looking for for the past two years (it was hiding under a large pile of clothing), I gave up on any pretense of being impressive.

  Very slowly. I drew the following picture of James Madison in MS Paint.

  “I think that’s good,” the camera lady said.

  So much for the edited essence of myself.

  I arrived in Austin for another round of talking to a camera, this time in the company of the actual TV interviewer.

  He had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. They were so white as to be almost blue. You could hypnotize a person using teeth like that. He was just the right degree of tan and wore a fetching plaid shirt and loafers without socks. He looked like a walking advertisement for the state of California.

  By the time we’d finished a half hour or so of interview, I began to feel that the pressure was on. I had thought I was going to the Pun-Off for a third time just because I loved being among fellow punsters and it would be fun and relaxed.

  But now that there was all this footage of my office and my coworkers offering testimonials to my pun-making, I decided I had to put in some more effort.

  I began to feel myself wanting it. Hope started forming. Hope is the most dangerous thing in Pandora’s Box. It’s what makes all the other things so impossible to stand.

  • • •

  So, apologies to:

  Kart, the friend who shared a thirteen-hour drive with me as I wavered between doing a routine on trees or presidents. Definitely presidents. No, trees. No, presidents, in order.

  My neighbors, who must have wondered why someone was repeatedly chanting the names of presidents through the wall at three o’clock in the morning

  the people on the subway who thought I was off my rocker as I murmured silently to myself while glancing periodically at my watch

  Martin Van Buren

  just everyone, really

  • • •

  When the day arrived, I waited on tenterhooks for my turn. I don’t know what a tenterhook is, but I have spent a lot of time on them. If I had right now to give you a definition, I picture it as something like comically oversized Velcro.

  The Pun-Off has the characteristic of most contests that are also communities, where you start to recognize certain people. I worried about all my competitors. I worried about Zeb, who had beaten me the previous year; the 2012 champion, who turned out not to show up; Tara, the only representative of New York’s Punderdome community, whose routine on sandwiches the previous year I much admired; and Miranda, even though she said this year she was just doing it for kicks.

  There were some wild cards, too: for instance, a British punster who had flown in and was wearing a chicken suit. What if he didn’t lay an egg?

  I hated being nervous. I wanted to win, but more than that: I wanted to be able to enjoy it.

  I wanted to win while I still thought it was fun, instead of necessary. When it was like a onetime trip to a casino to play a little blackjack and the outcome didn’t matter, instead of my Weekly Bus Trip To Mohegan Sun So I Can Win Big This Time and Get the House Back and Maybe My Wife Will Let Me See the Kids.

  I waited. I was behind Zeb, punning on trees, and Karly, a guy who always did well in Punslingers, punning on flowers.

  I gave silent thanks that I had opted not to pun about trees after all. Zeb got thirty-nine—the highest yet.

  Then Karly, throwing roses to the crowd, also got thirty-nine.

  I leaped up to the microphone, bypassing the steps altogether. I took a deep breath.

  “Folks, I think a lady PRESIDENT’S IN ORDER,” I began.

  Somehow I wasn’t that nervous. I knew my puns were solid. My only fear had been that someone would have the same topic. Nothing killed people’s enthusiasm for your puns about kale like being the fifth kale-punner in a long line. People will laugh at any pun, once.

  It had taken some work to come up with a theme to hang the puns on.

  The routine I had devised had somehow turned into a kind of feminist rallying cry. One of the things about the Pun-Off was that the competitors were mostly male. Not overwhelmingly male. And certainly not all the good competitors. Katie Kargman had won the year before I started competing, and she was a fierce punster who was beloved by the crowd.

  Still, definitely more guys than dolls. In some ways, being a girl did not hurt. You couldn’t help standing out a little from the white-haired, Hawaiian-shirted crowd. But it was on you to prove that you had actual pun chops.

  My first idea had been to make all the presidential puns jokes about losing control of your bladder, and that hadn’t gone well.

  But the lady hook seemed to bring it together. “MON, ROE v. Wade was a long time ago, and women have rights, and science,” I said. “With a microscope, any JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, (John can see atoms . . . that one’s rough) but any Jane can too. And if ANDREW JACKS ON auto, he shouldn’t win. If Mart pees in the van—and yes, MART, IN VAN BE URINE—that HARRISON of a gun has not earned our vote.”

  (You see why I apologized to Martin Van Buren?)

  “If JOHN throws a TILE OR tries to POLK a TAILOR, well—we should FILLMORE offices with his female PIERCE, that’s all I’m saying.”

  By the end—“Bad men can’t fix things. HOO-EVER, FDR TRU-MAN, EISENHOWER principles, they can! KENN-EDY student win? Sure! LYNDON, JOHN’S SON, was a D student, and he was great. NIX ON dumb ideas like turning a FORD CAR TER a REAGAN. No, when BUSH comes to shove, I see hope CLINTON on the horizon. Ladies, I DUBYA the hope of America, and I don’t say, OH, BUMMER”—the crowd was going moderately nuts.

  I got thirty-nine points.

  And this time, I won the clap-off.

  • • •

  You can tell that International Pun Stardom is a worthwhile aspiration because the only prize you get, apart from fame (SO MUCH FAME! ALL THE FAME!) is a trophy with a horse butt on it—the famous Quarter Horse.

  I could not have been happier with my performance. I was also glad because this was what the news narrative demanded. I got to be interviewed by the man with shiny teeth, gazing rapt at my quarter horse and joking that “my punning will atrophy now that I’ve got a trophy.”

  Getting back on the plane to Washington, I darted through the boarding doors with my trophies dangling perilously out of my bag. “What’s that trophy for?” one of the two gate attendants asked.

  “Punning!” I said.

  “Punting?” she said. “Only in Austin!”

  “No,” I said, “punning. You know, wordplay!”

  “I know what punning is.”

  “Make a pun for us!” the other lady said.

  “Uh,” I said, somewhat lamely, “I would, but it might not be interesting, and I don’t want you to be BOARD!”

  “Oh,” the lady said, “Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “No,” I mumbled, starting down the Jetway, “board, like, board the plane, you know—never mind.”

  Ah, the real world. Just like I remembered.

  • • •

  Maybe puns were always the golden thread leading me forward.

 
“The pun is the lowest form of humor,” someone wise once said. “If you didn’t think of it first.” Puns, according to Miranda, are “inside jokes for smart people.” This made sense. The champion punster my first year competing was a Mensa member. (I found this out because he told me. That is always how you find out that someone is a member of Mensa.)

  For Miranda, they were a benchmark of knowledge of a language. When I first met her, she told me she knew six languages—and could pun in three. By the third year, she could pun in six.

  Punning is a dance with words. And the first rule of dancing is not caring if you look like an idiot.

  John Pollack, author of The Pun Also Rises, told an interviewer that puns are the whole essence of life. Puns are a triumph of failure. They are built for groans. If people don’t groan, you did something wrong.

  • • •

  The inveterate punster, that ominous fin following the conversation, knows this. He is doomed to pun and pun again and be met with bewilderment or outright rejection nearly every time.

  If you can pun, you can do anything. Puns make you impervious to failure. They’re the conversational equivalent of climbing to the top of the high diving board and knowing you’re going to belly flop. But you do it anyway. It’s a disease. It’s a compulsion. It’s a lifestyle.

  You put yourself out there and flop, spectacularly, again and again and again. No wonder it came so naturally. And sometimes you come home with gold.

  All those exercises when I was a kid paid off. Now, I’m a groan woman.

  Unreconstructed

  The first man I ever loved had been dead for a hundred and thirty years.

  Among other problems.

  First crushes are embarrassing enough when they are on people who are alive, go to your school, and did not lead the Confederate forces during the Civil War.

  Yup.

  Robert E. Lee was my teen idol.

  I put his picture in my middle school locker. Everyone else had the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, proudly splayed in their Hip Jean Ensembles and big baggy shirts that made everyone in the nineties and early aughts look like they were ready to go bowling at a moment’s notice. To give you a full picture of my locker, I also had a picture of Jar Jar Binks and a collage I had constructed of James Longstreet and four other Confederate generals, which I had cleverly labeled THE LONGSTREET BOYS, but in the prime position was a big glamour shot of Robert E. Lee I had printed out, resplendent in all his sepia-tinted dot-matrix-stippled glory.

  They could keep their Chad Michael Murrays and their Leonardo DiCaprios, their coy Jonathan Taylor Thomases with milk mustaches (“Got milk?”). I had the one stud to rule them all.

  “Sure, Leo’s okay,” I thought. “But where is his warhorse Traveller? Sure, Justin Timberlake can sing. But he would have been helpless at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Nick Carter? Yeah, he’s cute, but would he have coped with defeat at Gettysburg by turning to his adjutant and crying out, ‘Too bad! TOO bad. OH! TOO BAD’? Doubtful.”

  In retrospect, I see how awkward this was. Not just awkward. This was an ill-advised crush with centuries of history against it. Centuries. And justly so.

  “Oh God,” you’re probably saying right now. “Ahhh, you are some kind of horrible racist person.”

  All I can do is tell you “I’m not, I’m really not, I promise,” but that’s never as instantly convincing as you want it to be. Starting a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but” is almost universally a poor choice. The only safe end to that sentence is to get up, walk silently away, and spend the rest of your life battling injustice.

  But let me at least try to explain.

  • • •

  My fixation with the Civil War started in the fifth grade. We had to read historical biographies. I beelined to the L shelf a second too late to grab the Abraham Lincoln book. The Robert E. Lee biography was free, though, and I read it cover to cover. I was hooked.

  I read six biographies of the man, each progressively worse, some with passages about his sex life that I demanded my history teacher explain to me. “When he wrote to a female acquaintance on her wedding night, ‘How did you disport yourself, my child? Did you go off like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning?’,” I asked, “what did he mean? The biographer says the innuendo is obvious, but I have racked my brain and discovered nothing obvious about it.”

  “Er,” Ms. Borchart said. “Er. Have your parents explain it.”

  The trouble with most biographies of Robert E. Lee is that they are written by unremorseful former Confederates with names like Jefferson Davis Pickett “Die Sherman Die” Jackson and they have titles like, Robert E. Lee: God’s General and Robert E. Lee: Like Jesus, but More Honorable. How incredible, I thought, paging through them, that such a genuinely superior human had ever been so maligned by history. Why wasn’t EVERY middle school named after him, instead of just a couple in Virginia? Where was his picture in all our textbooks?

  I set out to set the record straight.

  “Duty is the sublimest word in our language,” I scrawled on the designated Meaningful Quote space we each were given on our desks. “Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.—Robert E. Lee.” I cut out his picture and glued it on my history textbook.

  My parents tried to rescue me from an obsession they quite correctly realized would be deeply embarrassing later. For Christmas, my mother gave me a book called Lee Considered, which offered a critical perspective on Robert E. Lee. I refused to even skim it.

  They looked on, helpless, as I carried my Lucky Stuffed Robert E. Lee figurine to my progressive middle school to bring me good fortune on my exams. Lucky Stuffed Robert had distinguished gray hair and rode a little stuffed replica of Lee’s horse Traveller.

  They kept trying to sit me down and explain that, while I knew that Robert E. Lee was a gentle soul who was followed around by a friendly chicken on his campaigns, and that he was clearly not a racist because of one apocryphal anecdote I had found in the third book about his postwar career, maybe other people did not know that. Maybe I could keep my voice down in this restaurant so that people did not come over and chide them for Passing Their Awful Retrograde Views on to an Innocent Child. Would I like a book about General Grant? How about a nice book about General Grant? General Grant was really cool. He smoked cigars! Once he got arrested for speeding . . . with a horse! Didn’t I want to get into General Grant?

  No, I said. I was adamant. What Robert and I had was real, and I knew it.

  Every conversation was a land mine. Scratch any subject and I could find a Robert E. Lee connection.

  My high school put on Les Misérables. “Les Misérables!” I said. “That reminds me of a great joke from the Civil War era, when someone asked an old Southern lady, ‘Hey, have you heard of Les Misérables’ and she said, ‘Well, they’re a darn sight better than Grant’s Misérables!’”

  There was a silence.

  “That was the punch line,” I added.

  At home, our cat jumped on the dinner table. “Get that cat off the table,” my dad said.

  “Robert E. Lee’s cats used to sit on the dinner table,” I volunteered, cheerily. “I found it in his wartime letters.”

  The cat looked menacingly at us. She got vicious if you tried to remove her from a surface, hissing and lashing out at everyone around her, like General McClellan if you tried to get him to move his army before he was ready.

  “See?” my mother said. “There’s precedent.”

  “Well,” my father said, looking a little pained, “if it was good enough for Robert E. Lee . . .”

  Back at school, we studied sexually transmitted diseases. “Gonorrhea!” I exclaimed. “Robert E. Lee’s corps commander A. P. Hill had that!”

  “How do you know these things?”

  I shrugged modestly. “You read a few biographies, you pick
these things up.”

  • • •

  Online it was worse, if that were possible. My screen name was RELee[string of numbers I should probably not divulge]. (Embarrassing old screen names are the lower-back tattoos of the Internet age.) I spent hours in AOL Reference chat rooms pretending that I actually was Robert E. Lee, because I was unclear on the concept of how screen names worked.

  The conversation usually went something like this:

  ScreenName2: A/S/L?

  ScreenName3: 42 M Texas.

  RELee: 61, but vigorous/M/The Maryland countryside, astride my loyal horse Traveller

  ScreenName1: whut

  RELee: Good evening to all.

  XXXlubeee7: want 2 see sexxxy vids of Britney & Xtina mud wrestling?

  RELee: I am content in my marriage to Mary Custis Lee, thank you. What think you of the present time of trial?

  ScreenName3: haha HI Robert

  RELee: Good evening to you, sir. Have you news of General Stuart? I fear that he is riding around the Union army again, in defiance of my orders.