Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  I text Ally about sending over some categories she remembers from Punderdomes past, and the laundry list she delivers should be enough to sustain several practice sessions. I set my iPhone to stopwatch, put five minutes on the clock, and glance at the first topic on Ally’s list. It’s Feminism. Go!

  The words slut walk are the first that pop in my head. That is probably not good news for me as a person. Next is suffragette. I can take a plane but I will not suffer a jet. Okay! Breast cancer awareness appears and there’s nothing I can or should do with that. Then there’s Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famed abolitionist. Her existence was a coup for feminism, right? I probably should have skipped this topic.

  At the end of five minutes, I have a bunch of prompts, but only two puns that might go over well at Punderdome: “Lumberjacks get birth control from Plaid Parenthood,” and “I mix up parts of the couch because I’m intersectional.” Did I mention it took me five minutes to come up with these? A short while later, I realize I could’ve wedged “mansplane” into a line about suffering a jet, which would’ve been pretty sweet if I’d thought of it in the moment, in front of a crowd, and not alone, sprawled across my bed, the only audience my cat and whichever NSA spy is assigned to my MacBook camera.

  Not everybody needs to do this. Some punsters are pure naturals, proficient without practice. The very first time Rekha Shankar entered Punderdome and competed as Punky Brewster, for instance, she won. Then she kept coming back and kept winning. Sometimes, on weekends, she would illustrate two-panel pun comics on her blog—as a challenge to regularly create share-worthy wordplay—and that’s about as close as she got to formally practicing. Rekha considers the work she does spot-pitching ideas for funny videos on MTV News and ClickHole to be practice enough.

  Other people put in a maximal effort. Ben Ziek poured a lot of hours into becoming the Final Boss of pun competitions. The first year he competed in the O. Henry, Ziek prepared for Punslingers by creating a PowerPoint that pulled topics at random. He rigged it to display categories for five seconds at a time, the screen flashing a stop sign eventually. Ziek took on these topics over and over, pushing his mind to excrete its boundless stores of trivia and puns until doing so became a reflex. It was not a skill that endeared him to many other people out in the world.

  Earlier this year, Jerzy Gwiazdowski and his brother Jordan, a.k.a. A Little Kick in the Punt, developed their own unique method of practicing: a podcast.

  Jordan, who is four years Jerzy’s junior, is an actor with a nasally voice that often unexpectedly veers into an old-timey auctioneer’s or a cartoon squirrel’s. He moved to New York in 2013 from the Gwiazdowski home base of Milwaukee, where he’d felt creatively cockblocked. Before arriving in his brother’s adopted city of a decade, Jordan had no interest in punning—not until tagging along at Punderdome one night to see what Jerzy had been hyping up during Christmas visits. He quickly found himself enjoying the competition, one of many performative outlets he had discovered in the city—along with a series of impromptu dramatic scenes set in a bar, and the kind of experimental theater pieces that require full-frontal nudity. He kept going back to Punderdome with Jerzy, and he kept improving. (“I took him on as my padawan,” is how Jerzy tells it.) Jordan’s acting career also got a boost around the same time, when his low-key doppelgänger, Adam Driver, became a huge star. Then came the podcast.

  You’ll notice there are not a lot of pun-based podcasts. Despite the fact that podcast categories have begun to reach Rule 34–level diversification, the demand for pun content in this medium has been less than robust. The Gwiazdowskis didn’t set out to contribute to it either. When they considered starting a comedy podcast, though, they couldn’t agree on any idea until they randomly recorded some practice sessions for the 2015 O. Henry. That’s when Punk Assed: A Puncast was born. Although the formal practice didn’t help either brother actually defeat Ziek at the Pun-Off—Jordan had the misfortune of going up against him in the first round—they both enjoyed these recording sessions so much they looked into whether anybody else was putting out a pun podcast. Nobody was.

  Each episode of Punk Assed offers a series of pun games and the odd lesson on great punsters in history. Once the brothers got a few episodes under their belts, they quickly noticed that the show had a side effect of keeping them more primed for Punderdome than ever. They’d built in a surefire incentive to practice each week, and the effort showed. Since Jerzy and Jordan started recording, the two have faced off in the final round at Punderdome several times. Although the podcast audience remained modest, the two are committed to putting out Punk Assed as they gear up for the 2016 O. Henry, where they expect their pun-superpowers will carry the day.

  As the Punderdome hibernation months began, though, the Gwiazdowskis found the format of the podcast was getting a little stale. They decided to freshen it up with some new voices, by throwing a party that would double as a recording session. They invited some Brooklyn punsters to the studio for beer, pizza, and pun games. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

  “This is going to be brutal,” says Max Parke, a hulking, Vandyke-bearded friend of Jerzy’s, who looks like a really tall hobbit. “You guys are internationally ranked punsters. It’s like if Picabo Street invited me to go skiing.”

  “It’s not a competition, we’re just messing around.” Jerzy says. “Nice pull on Picabo Street, though.”

  We’re inside Front/Pearl Studio, which is actually a basement loft on a cobblestone street corner in DUMBO. It belongs to Jerzy’s friend, Trevor, a bearded actor in a newsie cap with a wily smile. Just beyond the sparsely furnished parlor is an alcove Trevor has converted into a studio space. The room’s centerpiece is a small stage he built out of reclaimed wood from the Coney Island boardwalk, and atop that stage rests a drum set and speakers. The band Beirut used to practice here, I’m told more than once, as though whatever audio alchemy launched Beirut into the Coachellasphere is perhaps lingering in the exposed brick. It smells like patchouli oil and cedarwood and the faintest trace of basement musk. A mishmash of blankets has been arranged in front of the stage, big enough that it could easily accommodate a large picnic or orgy. We’re just waiting for a couple more people before we get started.

  Aside from Trevor and the Gwiazdowskis, there’s Melton, a novice punster with a middle school student’s wispy mustache, and Max, a computer programmer who has been grinding it out at Punderdome for years but has made only modest progress. Homestar Punner, a.k.a. Sam Corbin, is a Punderdome star who is supposed to be here but is running late. A couple other actorly friends accepted the invitation out of sheer curiosity. They don’t quite know what is about to happen.

  Jerzy and Jordan are hunched over at opposite ends of the room like twin rooftop gargoyles, scribbling pun challenges on their notepads, pizza grease coagulating on the surface of untouched slices nearby. Jerzy is wearing a long-sleeve V-neck and fuzzy blue socks; Jordan has a camo hoodie pulled over a baseball cap, and his fingernails are painted shiny black. They look less like brothers than most brothers.

  In the kitchen, Trevor is making me a drink: cherry moonshine with hellfire bitters. As he mixes it together, he produces a tiny bottle plugged with a medicine dropper. The label has a green lightning bolt running down the side.

  “Are you 420?” he asks.

  “He means ‘Are you four and twenty blackbirds,’” Jerzy says, without looking up.

  “Oh, I thought he meant, like, ‘Are you ten Jackie Robinsons,’” I say. The movie, 42, came out recently; otherwise, I’d never have known Robinson’s number.

  Clearly, nobody needs it explained that 420 is a shibboleth of pot friendliness. If you made a Venn diagram of the average Punderdomer and the archetypal stoner, I assume it would resemble the circumference of a bong’s rim. This is the first I’m seeing it firsthand, but it’s something I’ve wondered about: Does getting high elevate punsters to some cosmic plane of thought, a rocketship to the northernmost stars in the lexical galaxy, or does it guarantee a
failure to launch? I’m about to find out. Trevor puts a few drops of pot bitters in my drink, and it tastes like a dank licorice slushie. Here we go, away with words.

  Jordan reports that Homestar Punner might not be arriving for a while, so we should just start without her. Everybody files in front of the stage and starts arranging themselves across the blankets. Trevor takes a seat at his stageside organ while Jerzy and Jordan fiddle with their recording equipment.

  “After making thirty episodes of the podcast together, we’re looking to spice things up in the bedroom,” Jerzy says.

  That’s where we come in. Our presence adds the pressure of an audience, but also, the brothers hope, the load-bearing weight of collaboration. When any of us has an idea, we are encouraged to say it into the microphone.

  Soon, Jordan hits Record and the show begins, just as the first languid waves of pot tranquility lap at my brain. The idea of speaking suddenly seems like an impossibility.

  The most elemental game the Gwiazdowskis play on the podcast is called Bro Pun Says We, which takes me far too long to realize is a pun on Open Sesame. The two give themselves ninety seconds to come up with puns on a topic—well, officially ninety seconds, but more like a few minutes—and then go back and forth until they run out of steam. Usually, Jordan rolls a D&D twenty-sided die to pick a numbered topic from the PUNY page, but tonight, they throw the question out to us. Melton suggests: Mammals.

  “Rocky 4 is my favorite movie I ever saw Dolph in,” says Jerzy.

  “That’s gorilla good Dolph movie,” Jordan says, kneeling in a b-boy pose. “Can you think of any otter ones?”

  Max yells out “Rats!” and nobody reacts. “You know, like as a one-liner?”

  I ransack my mind for mammals, but punnable ones are suddenly an endangered species. The image of an ape appears and so much time goes by without a pun occurring to me, I’m eventually just looking at an ape with my mind’s eye, waiting for him to do something cool. Then I move on to dinosaurs. Right as the category collapses, at the exact moment Jordan asks if anybody needs a rimjob since he’s around to blow holes, I finally feel confident enough to shout something out.

  “This old guy asked me if those Jurassic-era beasts were mammals and I said ‘Daaah, I-don’t-know, sir.’”

  The pot has definitely kicked in.

  “Oh, wow—from left field!” Jordan says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Also: Not a mammal!”

  “Yeah, but that’s why I said I didn’t know,” I clarify.

  “Speaking of prehistoric mammals,” Jerzy says. “Max is looking like one over there with his woolly man-mouth.”

  Everybody cheers and Trevor lays down some organ thunder. Through my haze, the melodic soundtrack lends the whole experience a surreal, silent movie aura.

  The next game has a lot of history. Jerzy and Jordan used to play it as kids on long car rides with their father. There’s also a similar improv exercise called 185. A certain number of somethings walk into a bar—in the improv exercise, it’s 185; for Jordan and Jerzy, it’s 99—and the bartender refuses to serve them. The somethings then offer a punny retort. At present, the somethings are ducks, although everyone is encouraged to yell a new topic when the current one runs out of steam.

  “Ninety-nine ducks walk into a bar,” Jerzy starts. “The bartender says, ‘We don’t serve ducks here,’ and the ducks say, ‘Oh, but you’re down with geese?”

  These jokes would be hard to execute, stone sober. As is, my mind is like one of those stuffed-animal grabber machines; the metallic claw fumbling inside of a word cloud, suffixes and syllables spilling out of its clutches, so many quarters eaten. Sometimes a pun dances on the tip of my tongue and disappears like a lost sneeze. I stay silent, and nobody else interrupts the brothers’ flow for a long stretch.

  When the topic turns to pro wrestlers, Melton clears his throat.

  “Ninety-nine pro wrestlers . . . walk into a bar and the bartender says . . . ‘We don’t serve you.’ So one of the wrestlers goes, ‘Have you Cena John?”

  The difference in delivery between the Gwiazdowskis onstage and Max, Melton, and myself in the crowd is pronounced enough to be its own category of sonic. We three lesser punsters speak very deliberately, like we’re just learning the language, feeling out how the words might syllabically hang together, and desperately trying to mold them into a joke. Meanwhile, Jerzy and Jordan generally sound like they’re reciting polished material from a script. With this golden-hued delivery, Jerzy can do a wrestling pun that hinges on, “Can you smell what the Rockettes cooking?” and still sell it all the way.

  “Not serving wrestlers? WWF, man?” Trevor yells from his perch at the organ.

  After a few minutes, I’m still struggling to grasp the structure of this game, but I decide to give it a go. My lone contribution is convoluted nonsense.

  “Ninety-nine pro wrestlers walk into a bar and immediately meet a woman named Jessica,” I say, boldly disregarding the bartender’s role in the joke. “The wrestlers start talking to Jessica and she asks, ‘Do you ever get hurled through the air?’ And they say, ‘Jessie, the body venture-a.’”

  Actual silence. Room tone. I can practically hear the hiss on the recording as air whooshes gently against the microphone. Sometimes only part of a word can be used for a pun, and then the rest of it just hangs there, like a remainder in long division. These kinds of puns are usually the least funny, and this one has other problems as well. When I listen to the podcast later, I’m glad this part has been cut. I decide to keep quiet for a while. Maybe if I just sit back and absorb, I’ll catch a contact pun-high and start throwing down some serious heat.

  Despite the fact that the pot hasn’t made me more creative so much as it’s installed a floating hall of mirrors in my head, when Trevor circulates a small glass pipe, I absorb that, too.

  The air in the room seems to lighten after Homestar Punner arrives. Sam’s a playwright and editor with curious eyes, a mop of messy blond locks, and a hair-trigger laugh. She’s way closer to the Gwiazdowskis’ level than the rest of us, with a dedication to punning that goes far beyond the Dome. Lately, Sam has been experimenting with pun-based performance art. One piece she staged in Central Park involved Sam dancing around in a bear suit to a song by the band Grizzly Bear while a friend held up a sign that read bear with us. Then her friend flipped the sign around so that it became bare with us, and she stripped down to a flesh-colored suit and bared her soul. Some of the passersby would get angry and yell. Others would clap. One guy talked to them about Jesus, but he probably would’ve done that anyway had there been no bear puns.

  Jerzy and Jordan abandon the stage and join the rest of the group in a circle on top of the blankets, placing the microphone stand in the center. The next wave of games begins with Headlines. It’s something Jerzy cooked up after he and Words Nightmare beat the editors of the New York Post at Punderdome. One of the brothers reads a bizarre story from the day’s news and we all come up with headlines for it. Something about the addition of Sam and the human feng shui we’ve just done makes everyone less shy about jumping in.

  The first story involves a man accused of assaulting his girlfriend after she wouldn’t smell his armpit. There is a lot to unpack here: brands of deodorant, body parts, the simple act of stinking. Sam yells, “Underarm Her,” and crooks her elbow in the air to demonstrate. Trevor adopts a Mr. T voice and croaks out, “I pit-y the fool” from his organ seat. Jerzy says “Law and Odor.” The room soon ruptures with ideas that abandon the Headlines structure, and each produces aftershocks of laughter.

  “The girlfriend is now under twenty-four-hour protection,” Sam says.

  “Because, man, he was really sweating her.”

  “‘I swear I’m in here for trying to get my girlfriend to smell my armpit,’” I say, a pleading tone to my voice. “‘Right, guard?’”

  What we’re all building may be epically pointless and ephemeral—an inside joke that never catches on, a loud parade through a ghost town—bu
t I am nonetheless fully invested in helping it come together. We’re feeding off one another’s energy and riding the lingual wave together. Maybe it’s because we’re standing around in a circle, like a breakdancing crew, but this party is starting to feel like a gang initiation ritual. I briefly imagine another group of punsters preparing to battle us in an abandoned warehouse downtown, stunting through the streets like Michael Jackson’s Bad video. Apparently, I’m still stoned.

  The cerebral starburst when a pun epiphany hits the group and everyone starts laughing, though, is its own high. During a break, Max complains about his neighbors blaring high-octane EDM while he tries to watch TV late at night. Sam blurts out, “That’s so ravin’.” Everyone dies laughing. This is the Hellenic ideal of what a pun can do. That moment when the elements are right there, then someone ties them together and spits the lotto ticket—it’s addictive. You see it in movies and shows, like when the guys in The 40-Year-Old Virgin are riffing on a penis cake pan, and Steve Carell comes up with “Betty Cocker.” Playing pun games like these, without the competition, feels like we’re always on the edge of that moment. But then there’s the opposite moment, the feeling of coming up short while riffing in a group and ruining the rhythm. You see moments like this in pop culture, too, like when Ricky Gervais tries to think of a dessert pun to follow “It’s just a trifling matter” in The Office and can only hem and haw. I try not to think about how that possibility is always lurking.

  One of the headlines is about an off-duty Florida cop who was fired for jumping onstage at a death metal show in full uniform. After almost every option is exhausted, Jerzy says, “We need to guitar police force in gear.”