Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  One of the idea’s detractors is Dr. Richard Lederer, a linguist who has written several books on puns and has been barred—in a friendly, respectful way—from competing at the O. Henry Pun-Off, due to his professional leg up. When I talk to Dr. Lederer, weeks after the conference, he is emphatic about wordplay being a sign of intelligence rather than a mental aberration. Despite the fact that his livelihood depends on the idea that he’s right, his argument holds water. While the poor soul who literally cannot stop punning even for a moment might suffer from an affliction such as witzelsucht, according to Dr. Lederer, the average person putting disparate words and phrases together is basically doing hammer-kicks at a cranial CrossFit. Nobody in the world has yet laid eyes upon the brain scan of a person in the middle of a pun competition, but Lederer hypothesizes that doing so would reveal a brain that looks like it’s on fire. (But, like, a good fire.)

  Dr. Attardo is now back and hurriedly putting out a donut and coffee spread.

  “This may be more of a question for a neuroscientist, but assuming no mental disorder, what goes on inside a person’s head when they make a pun?” I ask.

  Dr. Hempelmann, who looks thoroughly unthrilled to be here, considers for a moment and then announces, “You’d probably have to ask a neuroscientist.”

  I’m about to scream into the nearest couch cushion and ask if anyone knows the linguistic implications of why I’m doing that, when Dr. Attardo, probably sensing that his colleague’s answer could have been a touch more expansive, sets aside the napkins he’s neatly stacking and clears his throat.

  “Basically, here’s what the neuroscientist will tell you,” he says. “A good way of representing what’s in the brain is to think of it as strings of lights on a Christmas tree. So you have one string that’s white, and those lights are all the associations of meaning. If you have ‘dog,’ you have ‘puppy’ and ‘bitch’ and all the words that are related to dogs. So that’s one string, but then you’re going to have another string that’s red and it’s ‘fog,’ ‘bog,’ ‘log’—all the associations on the sound and all the sounds that begin the same way. What is happening when you make a pun is that you’re kind of crossing the strings of lights.”

  I picture this happening in my head onstage at Punderdome. I’m frantically trying to decorate a Christmas tree in ninety seconds while an elf sings the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song, pine needles flying everywhere, and with hundreds of people watching. It feels about right. Punning is just tangling up Christmas lights.

  When I do eventually talk to a neuroscientist who has devoted time to studying puns, he confirms the accuracy of this description. However, Dr. Vinod Goel is more interested in what happens in children’s brains when they hear a pun. Many of the first jokes kids hear and tell each other are actually stealth education bombs alerting them to the existence of alternate meanings for words. When children find out that what’s black and white and r-e-a-d all over is a newspaper, their brains explode with verbal aptitude. However, Dr. Goel seems to agree with Dr. Hempelmann about pun appreciation in adults being something like a defect. He contends that while puns are important for children, as people get older, they should make a permanent switch to semantic jokes that depend upon the nonliteral meaning of words and background information. According to Goel, anyone opting for the less sophisticated wordplay that is the bread and butter of pun competitions must be deeply immature. Judging from my experience in the pun world thus far, this diagnosis is hard to argue with. Just this past month, a new competition called the Bay Area Pun-Off has sprung up in California, and the man who started it is a counselor at a summer camp for adults. Case closed.

  Although immaturity is not a 100 percent flattering diagnosis, at least it doesn’t equate adult affinity for puns with having the mental faculties of a stroke victim.

  At this point, Dr. Hempelmann is just looking at his phone. A couple of conference goers start to file in and gravitate, sleepy-eyed, toward the coffee. I ask if there’s anything either of the professors can think of that would help me deliver puns better in a competitive situation, and they look at each other for a moment as if telepathically deliberating over who has to answer me.

  “Monosyllables,” Dr. Attardo says, finally. “The shorter the word, the easier it is to make a pun because you have a better chance of finding something that’s similar to it.”

  According to Jerzy, longer words are the money words. When I’ve been practicing, I’ve racked my brain for these polysyllabic monsters first. But when speed and volume count, maybe there’s something to coming up with a few smaller puns to pad out your set. I think back to Jerzy’s puns and realize he does that, too. It seems he’s just as good at puns as he is at lying.

  “Also, try not to telegraph the punch line. The more unexpected it is, the greater the level of what we call logical mechanism or justification,” Attardo adds. “And if you can, bring in sex. That always gets a reaction.”

  A Ph.D. student with a serrated buzz cut and combat boots walks in and rubs her hands together. Her name is Elisa and she is ready to give me and some of the other conference goers a tour of the humor lab. It’s time to wrap up this conversation. As I’m packing my bag, I ask rather desperately if either of the linguists has any final thoughts about what makes someone proficient at puns.

  “I think it’s a sign of wit if you can feel language as it happens like muscles moving as you walk,” Hempelmann says. “But it could also just be a mental affliction.”

  It’s beginning to feel suspiciously like everybody who knows about puns and brains thinks people who pun a lot have something wrong with their brains. The ability to pun, though, seems to me more like a sign that something is very much right with your brain—as long as you know not to do it, like, during a murder trial. Punning is something the human brain can do but animals and robots cannot. When the inevitable machine uprising and/or Planet of the Apes scenario occurs, at least we’ll be the only ones able to make puns about it. Even the supercomputer that beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, Watson, wasn’t able to create wordplay. No computer program has yet replicated what happens in the human brain when a person puns. But I know someone who tried his best to make one.

  I first met Max Parke at the Gwiazdowski brothers’ podcast recording, and later had lunch with him to talk about his experiment: the Punerator.

  Max is a software engineer who has been going to Punderdome for almost four years. He considers himself a jobber, sort of a Washington General of pun competitions whose presence makes the other guys look good. While many competitors each month are actors, comedians, and writers—people who are used to having an audience—Max is a computer programmer, and Punderdome is his lone outlet for performing. About a year into going every month, he decided to combine his career skills with his hobby.

  One of the rules of all pun competitions is No Electronic Assistance. Smartphones are verboten. Max started to wonder, though, exactly what electronic assistance even had to offer. It’s not as if you could just whip out your phone when nobody was looking, google “Saturday Morning Cartoon puns” and find several megabytes worth of killer material. Max decided he wanted to test his software skills by creating a computer program that could actually make puns.

  His experiment basically followed the logic of Dr. Attardo’s Christmas light analogy. Max uploaded an encyclopedic depository of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and common phrases associated with a wide range of categories (a string of red lights), along with a rhyming dictionary (a string of white ones). Max’s goal was for the Punerator to cross these light-strings automatically and transform relevant words into punny phrases. He was never able to get it to work, mostly for the same reasons English speakers have an advantage over every other culture that puns—which is pretty much all of them.

  As I found out from Dr. Lederer, English is uncontestably the best language to pun in. It has by far the largest vocabulary in history, having surpassed a million words in 2009—twice as many words as the second-place Germa
ns. Punning in English is also easier because our vocabulary has absorbed elements of at least three hundred other languages, allowing for puns like “Paris is a site for soirees.” Another reason it’s great for punning is it’s not an inflected language like Latin or Greek, where certain parts of speech are frozen in carbonite. That blind carpenter who picked up his hammer and saw? He is what happens when a noun is transformed into a verb, which in some other languages is simply not possible. Especially, it seems, the language of computers.

  The sheer volume of words in any representative corpus would make too large a search space for a functional algorithm. In order for the Punerator to work, it would also have to go beyond monosyllables and find words that could combine to make up larger words in phrases. Harder still, it would have to do the opposite of disambiguating—an already difficult process for any computer program—in order to turn verbs into nouns, or to use, say, bank in a different way than it’s intended. The brain can do all these things instantaneously—pull, prod, and recontextualize words—while even the most advanced computer in the world with the most state-of-the-art AI still struggles to replicate such contortions.

  Max was never able to get the Punerator to reverse engineer his test case pun: “Iran so far away.” After he got a job in 2013, at a very popular software company whose name you know well, he gave up on the project and went back to analog punning. Despite the experiment’s failure, he remains a far better software engineer than a punner.

  The marquee experiment in the humor lab at Texas A&M University-Commerce is at least as ambitious as Max’s Punerator. It’s an eye-tracking device that reveals how the presence of humor affects smile intensity. The lab is housed inside a redbrick building with the vaguely Epcot-ish title, “Hall of Languages.” The layout of the experiment itself reminds me of Peter Venkman’s experiments in Ghostbusters, but that probably has more to do with the fact that I’ve observed very few academic experiments outside of a cinematic setting. The eye tracker looks kind of like two baby WALL-E’s on an even seesaw. Two strangers sit on opposite sides of a desk with the eye tracker between them. The WALL-E pointing at either person films their faces from an unflattering angle condusive to bullfrog-neck, and sends them to a split-screen display, where their every eye movement is noted. Elisa, the Ph.D. candidate, feeds the two students a script for telling a joke, just to break the ice, and then waits for them to start saying humorous things on their own. When they do, the eye tracker monitors the intensity of smile-change on a scale of one to four.

  Elisa tells students she’s studying conversation. They have no idea they’re actually humor research guinea pigs.

  While we’re in the lab, one of the conference attendees asks Elisa whether there is any information in the literature about gender or other demographics.

  “This is the literature,” she responds.

  Elisa is reevaluating the relationship between smile and laughter and humor in natural conversation, which means there is very little I can extrapolate here that would relate to connecting with a crowd. Although the experiment is far from over, so far it looks like laughter and smiling do not co-occur reliably with punch lines. There could be a bunch of complex neurological reasons for why that is, but what seems more likely is that different people process humor in different ways. The experiment has also revealed rather conclusively, though, what kindergarten teachers have been saying for ages: smiling intensity is contagious. (They may not have used those precise words.) Maybe the key to landing puns is smiling more intensely onstage—even if it sounds like something that will make everybody really uncomfortable if they’re not smiling already.

  I last through five more interminable sessions with a vast array of PowerPoint styles, before finally fleeing the conference during a coffee break. Before I make my getaway, Dr. Hempelmann pulls me aside and invites me out to the bar where everyone is meeting up later. I’m a little surprised, but I accept.

  When you go to a humor research conference, there is inevitably a moment where you stand around at a bar with heavily buzzed academics comparing iPhone podcast apps as if they were résumés. Forget about the string of letters in your official title; these are your real comedy credentials. It’s the modern equivalent of giving someone a tour of your bookcase or your music collection, which for a lot of people is done via iPhone now anyway. It’s also the first moment I’ve found common ground with anyone all weekend.

  Maybe it’s the difference between interviewing first thing in the morning on a Saturday and talking over a beer on Saturday night, postconference, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve now earned my comedy nerd wings from our podcast comparison, but Hempelmann and I are finally talking about something helpful.

  “The way to distinguish a good from a bad pun,” he says, cradling a beer stein, “is that it has to fully swing both ways. It cannot just be that you set up one context and then, boom, you go another way with the second sense. That other sense should already have been there.”

  He cites, as an example, the mad magician that pulled out his hare. The only way to improve this pun, he claims, is by hinting at the rabbit, like “The magician had too many animal props so he got mad and pulled out his hare.” This doesn’t strike me as any improvement, though, because rabbits are for some reason still parasitically inseparable from magicians in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century. But he’s absolutely right. Puns need a second sense to work in everyday life—that eureka moment where whatever you’ve been talking about dovetails with some concurrent element in one perfect word or phrase. But that can’t happen at Punderdome.

  “In a pun competition, you have to invent the second sense,” I point out. “That’s why setups always sound so random.”

  I search the room for an example.

  “Like, right now, I can look at this napkin and think, ‘Okay, something I sleep with is my nap-kin,’ but it’s not funny because we weren’t talking about a thing I sleep with and also looking at this.”

  “Yeah, it’s not funny,” Hempelmann says, a little too emphatically. “Maybe make it a little better? Like, ‘I had to bunk with my sister and I hadn’t done that since we were children: we were nap-kins.’”

  One of my shoes is tapping extra hard beneath the table. Hempelmann is smiling a little. Are we in a pun-off right now? I race through ideas. Napkindergarten? Snapkin. Gnat-kin. I’ve got nothing. Shit.

  “I’m not sure I’m making it better,” he says a moment later. “I’m not a comedian.”

  Just like that, our near pun-off has reached armistice.

  “Anyway, it’s hard to neatly sneak in two meanings when you’re making up a pun off one word,” I say, after a while.

  “Well, that’s exactly what a bad pun is, though. There’s a word with punning potential, but then you just force that second sense.”

  This is, indeed, the third kind of Bad Pun—the kind with a clunky, awkward construction that doesn’t quite hold steadily. It’s a stretch where reach exceeds grasp, like a punster with his arm extended for a high five that never comes. I search around for a way to make a pun that doesn’t fit this description.

  “I could say, ‘Let’s table this for now,’ I announce, “and that’s almost funny.”

  “Eh.”

  “Because we’re at a table.”

  “It is contextually present.”

  “But it still doesn’t quite work,” I add, kind of defeated. At this moment, my beer is empty, I’ve been listening to and talking about humor and puns for forty-eight hours, and I never really found out what accounts for someone like Ben Ziek and his preternatural pun prowess. My brain is starving for pretty much anything except puns right now.

  “Yeah, we weren’t talking about tables,” he says, and I have no response—in pun-form or otherwise.

  Fine, I surrender. A great pun, as they say, is its own reword. A mediocre pun, though, is just awkword.

  6

  Games and Shows

  It’s only February, but Ben Ziek’s yea
r is off to a strong start.

  Even though his presence at O. Henry has become as reliable as weather puns in local news, I still ring him up to see if he plans on going this year. It’s been a couple months since we last spoke, and perhaps something has come up. Maybe there’s an intergalactic pun-off in May, and Ziek has been recruited to defend Earth like in Space Jam. Sadly, that is not the case. (Yet!) But just as the sun rises in the east, the planet’s reigning champ will return to Austin in a few months to defend his title. At the moment, though, he’s excited because he recently passed the online Jeopardy! test. He could get a callback any day.

  When I check in with each of the Brooklyn crew to see how they’re weathering Punderdome’s off-season, and to do an O. Henry roll call, it seems like it’s been a strong year so far for them as well.

  Obviously, both Gwiazdowskis are up for the O. Henry. Jerzy is in Norway through most of February, developing plays with an eager batch of writers, and Jordan is working marathon hours in Queens, overseeing the launch of a hip-hop-themed burger joint. I’m surprised to learn, however, that there’s a third brother, Toby, who plans on flying in from Milwaukee to compete for the first time. It appears as though the Pun-Off is going to consist of roughly 7 percent Gwiazdowskis.

  Rekho does not plan on attending. She just joined Upright Citizens Brigade’s improv touring company, plus she’s already been to the O. Henry twice. Isaac is in the middle of directing the first two plays in an ongoing cycle, but he says he’s down. So is Sam, who is now rehearsing with a theater company to perform a piece she says is a mashup of Alfred Hitchcock and Eugene Ionesco, something I can’t even begin to fathom. Tim has newly left his job writing for the New York Post to edit the local focus blog Brokelyn, and he confirms that this is the year he’ll finally go to the Pun-Off. Ally is on a family vacation in the Virgin Islands, but she says she’s definitely on board. She also says that Nikolai, who beat her in the last Dome back in December and who is currently writing a screenplay in a California cabin, will also be coming along. When we get to Austin, we’re going to be rolling heavy. A swarm of Brooklynites is set to descend upon the southern-fried pun convention, like locusts in a triangle offense, and possibly wrest a horse’s ass–shaped trophy from Ziek’s cobra clutch.