Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  Theatrical history is littered with wordplay, much of it from Shakespeare himself. Picture the most acclaimed playwright of all time in his bedroom, dreaming up puns while dripping quill ink on his puffy tunic sleeves. That totally happened. A lot! When Thersites of Troilus and Cressida says, “But yet you look not well upon him; for, whomsoever you take him to be, he is Ajax,” it’s not just because a character is named “Ajax,” but because “a jakes” meant a public toilet back then. Never mistake the Bard for someone above poop and fart jokes. He couldn’t resist them. Perhaps it was a trait he picked up from reading Chaucer, who made flatulent puns on “a penny farthing” with alarming frequency. But whether the puns were dirty or not, Shakespeare clearly loved his verbal Russian nesting dolls, and it’s a tradition that continues to this day with many playwrights besides Sam Corbin. It’s also something that’s found its way into that most modern version of the Globe Theatre: your TV. Or more likely, your laptop.

  TV shows aren’t necessarily the current analog to plays in Shakespeare’s day—that would be the cinema of Nicolas Cage—but the narrative ones do share the same basic purpose, despite being shorter and absent of iambic pentameter. Some also share a dedication to punning, whether the writers admit it or not. But since a play is written only once, and Sex and the City generously spans seven seasons and two films, the writers on punny TV shows have to be able to crank out wordplay all day. The staff on certain sitcoms, and pretty much every late-night talk show, understands the pressure of a pun competition as much as anyone who’s ever graced the O. Henry stage, if not more so. Instead of competing for bragging rights, these people are trying to satisfy critics and fans and also keep their jobs.

  Bob’s Burgers is a whimsical animated sitcom about a quirky family who own a burger joint in a quaint seaside town. Pitched at grown-up goofballs, the show is also kid-friendly, buoyed by schmaltz-free positivity and catchy original tunes. Also, its voice cast is basically a Bonnaroo tent of hip comics. Bob’s Burgers premiered on Fox in 2011 and had all the makings of one of those brilliant-but-canceled one-season wonders, lamented in comment threads for years to come. But somehow, network TV got this one right. Bob’s Burgers defied the odds, surviving seven seasons and counting. One of the defining characteristics that’s helped the show thrive, though, is its systemic punniness.

  That isn’t hyperbole, either. Bob’s Burgers goes far beyond a mere fondness for wordplay; it’s more like a devotion, in the religious sense, with one of those calendars that has sunflowers and mountain vistas for every month. Puns don’t just pop up in the dialogue occasionally—although they sure do—they’re also embedded into the very fabric of the series. Each episode has a literal pun quota, with standing reservations at three separate points in the script. When the show’s writers have to produce these puns on a deadline, they become contestants in, well, if not exactly a pun competition, at least a pun challenge. I decided to find out how much that process changed between a Burbank office and a Brooklyn stage.

  Bento Box Entertainment is headquartered on a tree-lined street in the least glamorous section of Burbank. It looks from a distance more like an elementary school than the home of an animated comedy powerhouse. On the inside, though, there’s no mistaking it for anyplace else. Life-size cardboard standees of Bob and Linda Belcher greet you at the door, the characters coated in muddy twigs and leaves as per the episode “A River Runs Through Bob.” Hanging above a chocolate leather couch are framed cover stories from Variety and Entertainment Weekly, and assorted industry backslaps for a 2014 Emmy win. The entire Belcher family’s faces are also splashed across the elliptic curve of the reception desk. (Linda’s is obscured by a Slimer-green handwritten sign directing staffers to where they can purchase Girl Scout cookies.) The studio produces other shows, but Bob’s Burgers is the clear breadwinner.

  While I’m waiting to meet Wendy Molyneux, one-half of the show’s celebrated sister act writing duo, I sneak a peek around the corner. What’s on the wall in the next room makes me gasp audibly: a real-life Burger of the Day board.

  On each episode, Chef Bob will at some point scrawl a new culinary concoction on the wall of his restaurant, one of the show’s regularly scheduled pun moments. The freshly chalked menu might promote The Last of the Mo-jicama Burger (comes with jicama), the Beets of Burden Burger (comes with too many beets), or perhaps most impressively, the Cauliflower’s Cumin from Inside the House Burger (comes with cauliflower and cumin). This part of the show is so beloved and Internet famous that the writers published The Bob’s Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers around the time of my visit.

  The Burger of the Day concept was in place right from the pilot episode, where it served as a plot point. Bob has a good chuckle over his latest creation, the New Baconings burger (comes with bacon), but his pathologically mischievous daughter, Louise, erases and replaces it with the Child Molester (comes with candy). On the day the restaurant is being inspected, no less. You can probably guess whether or not hijinks ensue. In the following episode, Louise again switches the Burger of the Day, this time from Never Been Feta, to Foot Feta-ish, but the gimmick of Louise interfering with the sign stopped at this point. The sign itself remained a staple of the show, though, preparing viewers for all the puns to come, burger based and otherwise.

  At the Bento studio, on a mustard-yellow wall, there’s a section of chalk paint with a ketchup-red border that allows anyone to leave behind a Burger of the Day idea. The one on display now is a tribute to last week’s Leap Day, the Leap Pan-year Burger (comes with paneer and extra d’aioli). I’m just starting to think of possible replacements, when I hear my name called out.

  Wendy Molyneux has oatmeal blond hair, a warm smile, and simultaneously projects the demeanor of a rascally neighbor kid and her mom. She seems like someone you might steal an expensive bottle of champagne with when the wedding bartender isn’t looking.

  “Those burger puns are hard for me,” she says, gesturing toward the board. “There’s only so many ingredients, and you can only use kale so many times before people start to notice.”

  I’d sort of assumed all the writers were natural pun virtuosos, so this is a surprise.

  Wendy asks if I want the tour. Of course I want the tour. As we walk down the hallway by the writers’ offices, I see a corkboard full of press clippings. Whoever at Boston Herald interviewed Eugene Mirman—the comedian who voices Bob’s lovable dunce son, Gene—couldn’t resist the pun headline, mirman especially saucy on ‘burgers.’ To the left of this clip, though, is the honeypot: a sign-up sheet for Burger of the Day pitches. It’s a single page abutted with runoff suggestions on pink and yellow Post-its. A few pitches are crossed out with the word used next to them. Others are too ridiculous to make on air, including the Flux Ca-cheeseburger (comes with McFlys), three in a row based on the band Pearl Jam, and my personal favorite, I Know, Ryyye-t? (served on rye). All these suggestions are either alternates or inside jokes. The writers are expected to submit their top-choice puns with each script.

  Bob’s Burgers works like most other sitcoms in that the writer assigned to an episode goes off alone to write a draft, then everyone else injects it with notes and jokes. After that, it’s revise and repeat, until the script is optimal. The assigned writer on each Bob’s, though, must also produce three or four options for each recurring pun, and then the show’s creator, Loren Bouchard, picks his favorites. Aside from the Burger of the Day, the other regular puns are Storefronts and Rat Vans, both of which arrive during the opening credits.

  Because Bob’s Burgers is apparently under a witch’s curse, the credits depict the restaurant alternately overrun by rats, lit on fire, and finally crushed by a utility pole. As these disturbances occur, a new set of surrounding businesses springs up on either side. The one on the left is always a funeral home called It’s Your Funeral, but the one on the right has a new name each week—a used appliance store called A Fridge Too Far, maybe, or a boxing gym called I’d Hit That. When the rats in
fest, an extermination van immediately pulls up in front of the building, always adorned with a name like Wild Wild Pest, or Last of the Mousehicans. The writers need to keep replenishing puns for these services, week after week.

  “Usually what’s helpful is that there’s a lot of us,” Wendy says. “If you can’t really think of puns, you get a room—”

  “Get a room!” a smirking dude declares while walking by.

  “—and I’m not good at them so usually there’s like four or five of us sitting around, pitching puns.”

  “That sounds like a pun competition almost,” I point out.

  “Well, yes, but we’re not trying to top each other. It just helps generate ideas, being around other people,” she continues. “If someone does a yarn store pun, you might come up with one, too. If someone does a better one than you, it’s like ‘Oh good, there’s a better one!’”

  Wendy and the other staffers’ ability to wield wordplay is what led Loren Bouchard to build puns into every episode. When I talk to him a few days later, he confirms that although the Burger of the Day pun was always going to be a weekly feature, the storefront and rat van puns developed because he was so impressed with his team. The storefronts were originally just places nobody would want to live or work near, like Bass Drum Emporium or a raccoon sanctuary. Over the first season, though, Loren started leaning toward punnier names, and the writers began pitching more of them, like Maxi Pads Large Apartment Rentals. Gradually, puns were codified as the letter of the law. It took longer for Loren to realize he was also leaving money on the table, pun-wise, with the rat vans. At first, the vans always just read Rats All Folks. By season two, Loren was confident they could be new each week.

  “It’s the pleasure of being around these people who are good with puns, which makes you want to see what they can do,” he says. “It’s really impressive to me when it comes out so fast and you say ‘Jesus, how did you make that connection?’”

  I tell Loren he should come to Punderdome if he’s ever in New York.

  Eventually, Wendy’s sister, Lizzie, joins us. She’s slightly younger, has blond hair, too, but more a Disney Princess, hay-colored blond than Wendy’s, and the two share a similar fun energy. Lizzie asks if I’ve seen the writers’ room yet and I haven’t, so we head toward it. We walk past a bank of cubicles where computer animators are sketching characters from the show. It feels inappropriate, somehow, like seeing muppets hung on coatracks during production breaks at Sesame Street. Eventually we get to a room painted the same tapioca color as the inside of Bob’s Burgers. Beyond a set of perpendicular couches, the back wall is an illustrated facsimile of the restaurant’s countertop: napkin dispensers, condiment sets, and all. When they’re up against a deadline, this is where the writers get together to brainstorm puns.

  “If it’s a Burger of the Day or rat van, at least you have a starting point,” Lizzie says, plopping down on the couch. Right above her shoulder is a whiteboard where every episode title is scribbled in colored markers. Almost all of them are puns.

  “You can either go with burger ingredients or types of vermin. You come up with ‘mouse,’ which rhymes with ‘house,’ so you think of which movies have ‘house’ in the title,” Lizzie says. “For a storefront, I feel like there’s two schools of thought: you can just go off the name of a store that already exists—like Bloodbath and Beyond—or you can come up with a product another store could sell. Like, one writer had the idea Bronanas: Bananas for Men, but it didn’t go through, because Loren doesn’t do other foods for storefronts.”

  This is one of a few steadfast logic rules dictating how these gags work. Another is that the names of storefronts have to be semiplausible. Loren would never approve A Bird in the Band: Guitars for Birds, for instance, because nobody sells guitars to birds. (Yet.) Another rule is that the Burger of the Day has to sound at least somewhat delicious, because in the world of the show, Bob is low-key, the Mario Batali of burgers. The writers have to keep these constraints in mind when coming up with puns, all while trying to avoid pitching a repeat.

  “You could also just start with a phrase, like ‘Go big or go home,’ and go from there,” Wendy says, making me suddenly sure there’s an episode titled Go Bob or Go Home. “What was that one you did recently, Lizzie?”

  “Ton in the Oven: A Store for Large Babies,” she says cheerfully. “I hate to admit it but I have googled, like, ‘popular phrases in the ’90s’ to come up with ideas.”

  She also uses rhyming dictionaries, IMDb, and idiomatic encyclopedias, just like the copyeditors at the New York Post when they’re making headlines. Once the writers have enough potential ideas, the selection process for puns is as hierarchical as it is at the Post, too, with Loren Bouchard getting the final say. If all the effort that goes into making each Bob’s Burgers pun shows, though, sometimes it’s all the better.

  “We do try to get the sweatiest pun possible,” Wendy Molyneux says. “We’re not trying to get a laugh with the pun—we’re trying to get a laugh with the sweatiness of the pun.”

  Some puns are like IKEA furniture where there aren’t enough cam locks or nut sleeves and the instructions are missing a page and also you’re drunk, but you still attempt assembly. When you can just feel every expended neuron and synapse that went into a clusterfuck pun like Mitt Romney’s “There’s no plates like chrome for the hollandaise,” the joke becomes the effort itself. The only way to save an overwrought pun is by disowning it with your delivery. That’s why it’s easier to have a character on a show make a sweaty pun than to make one yourself. Some element of the character can make it funny that she is putting together this janky verbal bedframe, whereas when it’s, say, me in real life, describing the moment the bar runs out of limes as “lime-eleven,” you can’t really hide behind a character.

  If your name is attached to an episode of a show you wrote, however, you can’t really hide, either. At least that’s why Sean Gray, a coproducer on HBO’s Veep, is taken aback when I tell him he’s the author of one of that show’s punniest episodes. He is taken further aback when I send over a lengthy list of puns from it.

  “That’s probably too many puns,” he says over the phone from London. “It’s a lot.”

  Like Bob’s Burgers before it, Veep also had a pun as a plot point in its first episode. The vice president, played with acerbic intensity by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, gets into hot water, public opinion–wise, after using the expression “hoisted by our own retard” in a speech. It was a proper starter pistol shot for a show that thrives on vulgar pun insults.

  The reason Veep is so heavy on puns is because the creator and showrunner for the first four seasons, Armando Iannucci, demanded every line on the show be as sharp as possible. It was not an uncommon request, but his approach was unique. Iannucci instituted a policy of what some might call excessive redrafting. The show’s writers constantly retool scripts as they go along to make sure the dialogue is always crackling. As they run through draft after draft, they accumulate as many as a couple dozen alt versions of each scene. The puns then ultimately found their way in after Armando gave the frequent script note “more color.” That’s why characters often say things like “shituation room” the moment a scene even approaches having a dull moment. The puns are flourishes, rarely punch lines.

  The main challenge with putting puns into a narrative show, though, is making sure they stay in keeping with the characters.

  “All the characters speak in very specific ways so you want to make sure the gags and wordplay are organic to them,” Sean Gray says. “Fortunately with Veep, the world of politics is obsessed with jargon so it doesn’t feel out of place.”

  The character on Veep who tends to pull the most punny insults into his orbit is White House aide, and grade-A jackass, Jonah Ryan. When I ask Sean about how collaborating helps create puns for the show, he singles out something called the Jonad Files. This is a fictitious document for which several characters have contributed Jonah nicknames, making fun of his gangly ap
pearance and general weasel factor. The Jonad Files are only revealed during a court scene toward the end of the fourth season, which turns into a pun run of very dirty names like Jizzy Gillespie and Spewbacca. Sean and all the other Veep writers worked on this list together and had a blast doing it. The kicker to the scene, though, which Sean wrote himself, is most revealing about how puns can reflect character. Eventually, Jonah offers an example of the kind of nickname he prefers, “Tall McCarthy.” There is nothing funny about that pun on its own, but in the context of this particular person trying to get a flattering nickname admitted on court record, it’s hilarious.

  The puns on Bob’s Burgers are reflective of its characters, too. Not the storefronts and rat vans, perhaps, but the Burger of the Day is certainly a showcase for Bob’s sense of humor, and his love of puns informs the rest of the family.

  “I think Bob does not enjoy puns ironically,” Wendy says near the end of our tour. “I think he enjoys puns sincerely while the rest of the family thinks they’re groanworthy. So even the kids do pun jokes, but usually with a little nod toward the fact that they’re sweaty, whereas Bob doesn’t have that nod.”

  Of course he doesn’t. Bob is a drunken IKEA craftsman with his puns, jamming words together whether they fit or not. His sincerity is adorable—the exact opposite of Mitt Romney’s faux-folksiness. It would also probably slay at Punderdome.