Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  When the preamble ends and Jo reads off the names for the first round, mine is not among them. Jargon Slayer and Punder Enlightening are, though.

  “Are you guys ready to do the Dome?” Fred asks the crowd as the puntestants walk onstage.

  The first category tonight is School Supplies. All six competitors start scrawling on their boards as a guy in leather pants sings the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. Everybody sings along, and it sounds like recess at a hipster elementary school.

  Isaac is up first, and he unfurls a flurry of puns in a staccato rhythm, one after the other, rat-a-tat-tat. His set concludes with a big winner: “My favorite rappers? I have 88 of them. TI? 89.”

  It’s not often you see adults go legit apeshit over a hybrid hip-hop/calculator pun.

  If Looks Could Kale is on next. I recognize him from before the show started, when he approached Jerzy by the bar and whispered in his ear conspiratorially. The reason I remember him is that he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt like the kind the Firestones wear, which seems not by accident.

  “It’s Back to School season,” he starts. “Did, uh, anyone have a hard time getting here today with all these kids walking around . . . with their bratpacks?”

  Oof. The crowd groans in a way I haven’t heard yet in my limited pun experience, with a kind of aggrieved inflection native to sports bars during a big turnover. I’ve been wondering since my Thousand Island pun earlier tonight about the distinction between good puns and bad puns. Is there a Greenwich Mean Time of wordplay, some definitive standard to steer by? Or do you just know Bad Puns when you see them, like that horny Supreme Court justice said he knew pornography? In any case, I know it instinctively, in my bones, that “bratpacks” is a Bad Pun. This will be the first kind of Bad Pun I categorize on this journey: the False Alert. It’s when a word combination is either too simple, familiar, or obvious to be worth mentioning, but then you still do it anyway. Your heart was in the right place—you saw something and said something—it just turned out to be absolutely nothing at all.

  (Some people argue that all puns are this kind of pun.)

  A pity laugh rings out from somewhere at “bratpacks,” but it only draws attention to the absence of any other laughs. Hard to imagine there’s any coming back from a start like this, and there isn’t. When Kale finishes, he takes a bow and salutes.

  “We’re bringing up a multitime Dome champion now,” Fred says after the applause dims. “He’s going for a record four in a row. Please welcome: Jargon Slayerrrr!”

  Fred airs the name out like a wrestling announcer while Jerzy ambles over to the microphone, looking composed.

  “I’m glad they’re reviving Farm Aid, because I’m pro-tractor,” he says, getting a laugh.

  “Instead of going school-supply shopping, I went to a football game. But I don’t really like watching football in October . . . to me, it’s more of a JanSport.”

  The crowd is eating up every word, just like they did at the previous show. One of the blue-shirted finance dudes nearby even nudges another in the arm, which is as close as they’ve come so far to anything like an emotional response. The more specific Jerzy gets, the more applause he gets in return. Note to self: bring on the obscure brand names!

  “I’ll leave you with this,” Jerzy eventually says, like comedians do when teeing up their closers. “You know, I see a lot of men in the audience with big bushy beards and I’m assuming you’re all wild game hunters, but if you find out a deer you’re hunting is a doe, please don’t trap or keep her.”

  The clapping intensifies as Jerzy nods and falls back in line. When the clap-o-meter is brought forth, the crowd chooses him, Isaac, and a guy named Pun Tzu: The Art of Word.

  Jo and Fred immediately summon a fresh batch of players, and Punter S. Thompson again is not among them. I let out a long, jagged breath and try to psych myself up. If there’s any trouble, just remember: words that sound like other words.

  When my name finally is called, I slither through the crowd in a daze and float onto the stage. Jo shoves a small, lined whiteboard and a marker into my hands. Meanwhile, Fred introduces a woman with searing bright red hair, like magma coating her head, to sing while we write down our puns. This is it.

  Jo announces the category: Medicine. I’m relieved at first. Such a broad topic! Then I’m outraged when puns fail to magically appear in my brain. The redhead starts singing the DuckTales theme song and I try to make puns. My frenzied mental Rolodex scroll goes like this: “medicine,” “sickness,” “doctor.” Doctor? That sounds like docked her. That’s . . . something. What’s next? “Injection.” What’s funny or interesting about “injection”? Nothing. Let’s move on. How about “polio”? I can turn that into poly, yo. But what does that even mean? Maybe “roly poly, yo”? Jesus, time is almost up already. And all I can think about is the goddamn DuckTales theme song. Really, DuckTales ducks? You “might solve a mystery or rewrite history”? You’re not rewriting jackshit.

  In a panic, I start writing down any medical-themed words I can think of. Maybe the puns will materialize once I see them on the board! They don’t. Time is up, and Jo asks for our markers. I hand mine over. It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve only jotted down a handful of pun ideas and one of them is just the word cast. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I do need a doctor.

  As the first puntestant, Verbal Kint, timidly recites his puns, my mind is racing desperately. No matter how much I look down at the words on the board, they don’t resolve themselves into coherency, or even the special incoherency that is the coin of the realm here. Where do I start? What do I say? One other pun occurs to me, but before I decide how I’m going to say it or any of my other puns, Fred is calling out Punter S. Thompson and looking at me. Time is up.

  I walk over to the mic and force myself to look out into the crowd. Even though there are hundreds of people watching, waiting for me to say something, it doesn’t look like it. The lights are so bright I can’t really make out much beyond the first row. Shadowy, faceless figures loom like something from a nightmare, except the haziness is comforting since it seems to represent fewer people.

  “This is going to be . . . so quick, you guys,” I say, and the crowd laughs. Praise Yahweh!

  “I kind of lipo-suck at puns.”

  This was the one I thought of while staring at my board, and it gets another laugh. The audience suddenly feels less like an enemy.

  “I had to get that surgery because I was too roly poly, yo.”

  This time, the laugh is even bigger. I’m on a roll!

  “But the surgeon kind of messed up, so they docked her pay.”

  The audience groan-laughs, but it’s a laugh nonetheless. What I have said is pretty much a False Alert pun of the highest order, but since it sort of fit what could loosely be called the “narrative” I was spinning, the crowd gave me a pass.

  “All right, you do not want to hear what else I have written down,” I say and walk back. Jerzy gives me a thumbs-up from the side of the stage. The nervous energy drains from my body all at once, like piñata candy. That could’ve gone much worse!

  I’d been so caught up in a dread spiral that I hadn’t realized the woman with headphones nearby earlier was standing next to me onstage now. When Fred calls out Punky Brewster, she moves forward, some strut in her step.

  “I went to vet school, you guys, so I know every type of goose noise,” she says. “Guess you could say I’m a honkologist.”

  The crowd roars. While I struggled to clear thirty seconds onstage, Rekha makes two minutes feel like all the time in the world. The puns keep coming until she finally concludes with this knuckleball: “I have a high-definition TV and I eat, sleep, and breathe it. I basically pee HD.”

  Rekha’s time away had no effect on her punning ability.

  Next up is a goofy guy-girl duo named Punderella, who end their set by providing their actual phone numbers, then it’s the preppy guy who was in line behind me, a first-timer going by James Pun der Speak. He has
as few puns as I did, but he sets each one up with these incredibly convoluted stories that gradually win the crowd over.

  “This girl from my hometown, which was near a chemical factory, her name was Anna, and she used to run around a lot,” he says, smiling like a little kid about to say a swear. “So, after a while, her T-shirt would get stinky from all the methane in the air, and to knock you out the doctors gave you Anna’s T-shirt.”

  The laugh he gets is a groan-laugh. But it’s a really big groan-laugh.

  At the end of the round, when the human clap-o-meter emerges, we each have a moment to appeal to the crowd for applause. Funky dance moves are allowed, as are actual begging and pretty much anything else short of bribery—although one elfin boy does jokingly throw a few dollars in the air. Then the clap-o-meter reveals our fate.

  Verbal Kint slinks out to face the crowd first and doesn’t get much response. The clap-o-meter calls it a 6. Low energy does not seem to be the way to go. When it’s my turn, I haul ass to the edge of the stage with a mock-surprised smile, like I just realized the audience is there, and do a silly mechanical hand wave. People whoop and holler. I get a 7. It’s not enough to advance to the next round, but at least someone else did worse.

  “You were awesome,” Jerzy tells me when I get offstage. I can’t take a compliment anyway, but this feels more than usual like someone blowing sunshine up my ass.

  “I only had, like, three or four puns,” I protest. (It was definitely three.)

  “They were all good, though! It’s quality, not quantity.”

  This is the exact opposite of how Jerzy described O. Henry.

  “My mouth was watering from your category,” Jerzy adds. “I mean, Viagra alone.”

  How could I have forgotten Viagra! So many puns left on the table. Now that Jerzy mentioned it, Medicine truly was a rich category. So many long, syllabically outlandish words. So many different types of doctors, injuries, bones, diseases, equipment. Hodgkin’s lymphoma! I had squandered my turn. Now I’m left with a sharp feeling of loss unlike any other, which I decide to call Punner’s Remorse.

  A few minutes later, the second round begins. Fred calls out for Jerzy with the first batch of players. The category is: Underwear. When it’s his turn, Jerzy starts off with some stage banter.

  “Fred: I’m assuming briefs. And Jo: boxers?” Jo makes a face like fine, why not and there are muted cheers from the crowd, who either do not recall the affordably priced ’90s men’s underwear brand, Joe Boxer, or do not care.

  “I’ll keep this brief,” Jerzy says. “I eschew shirts and I pan tees.”

  The audience thaws, but only a little.

  “Come on, this is my best routine, this is my core set.”

  As some solid cheers roll in, he adds, “Spanx,” and the cheers get louder.

  “I just play it where it lace. That’s how I pun. It’s my victorious secret.”

  This line gets his biggest reaction yet. Jerzy looks around at the hollering crowd and nods, leaving on a high note. Closely following him is James Pun der Speak, the guy with the long, drawn-out setups. He packs in just as much deliriously dorky exposition as before. By the time he gets finished, the audience could not be more on his side. I search Jerzy’s face onstage and it’s unclear whether he’s worried. But he probably should be.

  Isaac begins like Jerzy did—by bringing Fred into the mix. “Were you in California recently, Fred? I can tell by the odor, because Fred reeks of Hollywood.” The crowd goes bananas and keeps up the energy throughout Isaac’s turn.

  The final participant in this round is P-Witty. She seems very excited to be up, her entire face a quivering grin. “Of corsets . . . hard to follow all these talented people, but I’ll try and see it through,” she says. This second one barely qualifies as a pun, but Ariel says it with kind of a nonthreatening Cheshire Cat smile and it lands.

  “The right bra really puts me in matin’ form,” she continues. “But when it comes to making breakfast the next morning, I’m quite the pan-tease.”

  The audience goes nuts, even though they’ve already heard puns on panties and corsets from Jerzy—maybe even more so, because of how different the two are from each other.

  After everyone finishes, James Pun der Speak leads the group with a 10 from the clap-o-meter, while Jargon Slayer, Punder Enlightening, and P-Witty all tie at 9.5. Since only two can advance to the semifinals, each of the three has one more awkward opportunity to plead for applause. Having just participated in this hammy pageantry myself, I sympathize. There’s only so much galloping across the stage or pretend-lassoing the crowd you can do before you just feel dead inside. Of these last three contestants, P-Witty gets the most applause. Isaac is second. Jerzy is out. He leaves the stage straight-faced, without ever betraying that he just ended a three-month streak.

  After a strong semifinal round, Rekha ends up in a climactic pun-off with Isaac. They fling puns back and forth for two minutes, words flying by ferociously, the audience working itself into a frothy lather. When it’s time for the audience to vote, Punky Brewster pulls more cheers. Punderdome is hers.

  After it’s all over, I catch up to Jerzy and ask whether he blames his loss on a skewed clap-o-meter. He doesn’t. Instead, he blames himself. He blames himself a lot.

  “I bungled my setups and meandered through that second round,” he says. “I could’ve done a whole string of bra puns—A cup, B cup, C cup—but I got hung up on putting them together in a story. I shouldn’t have even made it to that clap-off.”

  Jerzy shakes his head and looks at me with a crooked smile.

  “I sometimes get embarrassed by how seriously I take this,” he says.

  The way he takes it most seriously is by holding himself to the stricter O. Henry standards, even here, where anything the audience accepts as a pun is considered a pun. It’s an extra degree of difficulty most people in the crowd probably don’t notice, but it’s something that might give him an edge when he faces off against Ziek next spring. Did everybody in Austin share this Garry Kasparov–like intensity with Jerzy? Now that I’d experienced Punderdome firsthand, and heard about the O. Henry from a Brooklyn perspective, perhaps it was time to head down South and hear more straight from the horse’s ass.

  3

  The Place Beyond the Puns

  The number one factoid most people know about the late author O. Henry is that he was named after a candy bar, or a candy bar was named after him. At a distant second, they might also know that many of his stories ended with proto-Shyamalanian plot twists. The couple in The Gift of the Magi ruins Christmas . . . by being really terrible at Christmas. Ironic twist endings like these were his signature. So there’s a chance that O. Henry, whose real name was William Sidney Porter, is ROFLing in his grave about the twist in the story of his namesake Pun-Off. It turns out the world’s leading pun competition is named after an author with an even less substantial connection to punning than he has to peanuts, chocolate, and fudge.

  Nestled amid the steel-and-glass-engorged metropolitan cityscape of downtown Austin, like an apple inside a tool chest, is the taupe-colored cottage where O. Henry lived between 1893 and 1895. The house rests atop the kind of flood-proof brick stilts and crosshatched gating common to southern homes that have been uprooted and moved, which this one has. It’s a charming old place. You can easily picture its former owner cooling his heels on a porch swing, drinking entire oceans of bourbon, if not for the placard in the garden with a picture of his face that reads the O. Henry museum.

  The QR code is a bit anachronistic, too.

  An underburdened tour guide named Grant lets me in through a door with a stained-glass panel like a Mondrian grid painting and starts filling me in on O. Henry history. During the twelve years he spent in Austin, Porter was a Renaissance man. He held multiple odd jobs, played mandolin in local bands, and published a satirical weekly newsletter, The Rolling Stone. Then in 1895, it all fell apart. His wife was diagnosed with tuberculosis just as he was indicted for embez
zling from the bank that employed him. Rather than face the music, Porter split town for Houston, and stayed there well beyond his court date, as his wife’s health deteriorated back home.

  If Grant is paying attention, he can probably tell from my face that with every new detail I’m rapidly falling out of muted admiration for O. Henry.

  As the spiel continues, we walk through the Porters’ bedroom. I feel like a ghost cursed to haunt the turn-of-the-century American South. Floorboards creak with the precision of a horror movie foley, the framed photos are Civil War sepia, and a black church crown lies ominously atop the bed, as though its owner might at any moment cross dimensions and reclaim it. Through a slightly askew door I can see the back office and Grant’s desktop computer and venti Starbucks cup, bringing me back to the present day and the tale of O. Henry.

  After Porter’s wife, Athol, died, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. It was only then, locked away, that he began publishing under a pseudonym the short stories for which a nationwide annual award now bears his name. Upon earning an early release for good behavior, Porter moved to New York and signed a contract with the New York World to write a short story each week under the name O. Henry. Ultimately, he published 370-odd stories, although an unpublished bonus story is available at the museum. It’s called “As Others See Us,” and a sign adorned with a floating, Illuminatic eyeball says it can be mine for just $45. (Hard pass.)

  In 1910, O. Henry died from cirrhosis at age forty-eight. Considering the author’s legendary alcoholism, it would be a misnomer to call his death a twist ending. Now that we’ve wrapped up O. Henry’s story, though, one pivotal detail is still missing.

  “What’s the tie-in to punning?” I ask. “Was he just really into wordplay?”

  “Between you and me, he was not a huge punner,” Grant says. “That connection was made between the museum and the Pun-Off early on because it was held here, and it just stuck.”