Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  During Fred’s warm-up at Littlefield in April, I’m waiting near the front of the stage with Sam and Nikolai. Sam is still experiencing a butterfly stomach-swarm.

  “I should be all right, as long as the category isn’t, like, baseball,” she says. “But I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  The crowd is as massive as ever, but there are fewer champions than usual. The Gwiazdowskis are out; ditto Ally and Tim. Perhaps they’re all saving their verbal strength for the O. Henry next month. Isaac shows up toward the end of the warm-up, while Ariel announces her presence by doing a little dance with her pun partner that involves rubbing their butts together.

  At the start of the first round, Jo Firestone calls out Punter S. Thompson with the rest of the names, and I go onstage to assume the position. The category is Barnyard Animals.

  A million farm-bound images fight one another in my brain. It’s an agricultural bloodbath. Goat. Boar. Babe. Babe 2: Pig in the City. Cow. Bessie. What were the names of Garfield’s barnyard friends on Garfield, the animated series? The pig was Orson. Wait—was that a dig at the porcine girth of late-period Orson Welles? How did I not notice that until now?

  Time is up criminally fast and I haven’t written much down. This will be interesting.

  If Looks Could Kale is up first, and I tune him out to think about what to do with the words on my board. The only pun I have written down is “free range rover” and if you gave a million monkeys a million typewriters to make those words funny, they’d throw feces at you and you would deserve it.

  When it’s my turn, I step forward, the most uncertain I’ve been on this stage yet.

  “So, when I was a young lad growing up in Moscow, I wrote a lot in my dairy,” I say. Here comes the soft parade of goodwill laughter that greets all but the most dour first puns of one’s turn. Then I try out a “free range rover” pun, which is understandably dead on arrival.

  “This is going okay,” I say and earn a legit laugh because this is going barely okay at best. “I thought this round might be gruff. I was worried I’d boar you to death.”

  My voice is pitched low, in keeping with the self-deprecating pun style I’ve apparently cultivated. Surely this wasn’t what Paul F. Tompkins and Randy Sklar had meant by selling a bad joke. All in all, it was better than if I’d curled into a fetal ball onstage and wept for two minutes, but not by much. I look down at my board and all that remains unused is the word cock. Great. I search for other barnyard words that might’ve escaped me but the glare of the crowd is too much to handle, so I wrap it up.

  “All right, I hope I didn’t cock this up too much,” I say and retreat from the microphone like it’s on fire.

  Ariel’s team is up next, and despite my disappointment I’m excited to see what they come up with for this topic.

  “Did you hear about that one app horses use for making dinner reservations?” Ariel asks. “It’s called Open Stable.”

  “And when they do go out,” her partner, Tracy, adds, “they get drunk on Hennessey.”

  The two of them make it to the next round, as does If Looks Could Kale. I do not grab the third slot. My mind instead is awash with barnyard animal puns left unmade. Why didn’t I make up something that would’ve “behooved” me? Why didn’t I go to Eeyore or anyone really from Charlotte’s Web? Punner’s remorse is a motherfucker.

  At the start of the next heat, pairs fan out across the crowded stage like a cotillion. What tonight lacks in regular champs, it makes up for in teams of first-timers. The category is Transportation. Isaac goes last and he absolutely murders.

  “I fucking hate sedans and I hate SUVs,” he says dramatically. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a car-berater.”

  Onstage, Jo covers her face as she laughs.

  “I met a girl at the last Punderdome and we went home together,” he says, arching a bushy eyebrow. “I used protection but we really went at it and, well, I burned rubber.” Before the crowd can recover, he adds, “We were both really tired after that.”

  Just as his two minutes are up, Isaac throws in one more: “I rode out here in a family caravan tonight, so I had my nephew on one side and Nissan the other.”

  The heaven-shaking reception he gets helps explain why the champs keep coming back every month. Either they’ll get in a friendly competition and push each other to be more creative, or they’ll be the lone ringers in their heat as Isaac is here and stand out like a Krypton among Earthlings.

  When Jo announces that the final topic for the first round is Baseball, a light storm of panic flashes across Sam’s face. She shakes it off and starts writing immediately.

  One after the other, almost everybody in this round uses curveball as a pun, and only one of them uses it to refer to an oddly shaped testicle. I finally understand what Jerzy told me so long ago about adhering to O. Henry rules at Punderdome—avoiding words like curveball that already mean something beyond their literal meaning, because they’re technically not puns.

  It’s happening: I have begun to take puns too seriously.

  Nikolai is on fire and is clearly headed for the next round. My eyes are on Sam, though, to see how she’ll perform after eight months out of the game, and with a category she was actively dreading.

  “I’m surprised there are so many groups of two here,” she says. “Before tonight I’ve hardly ever seen a double play.”

  The crowd roars and Sam barely reacts to it. She looks in control, a subtle smirk teasing way more puns to come. Something about her delivery makes you feel you’re in good hands.

  “I met a guy on a dating app for abusive people,” she says in a far more chipper tone than the words suggest. “He was a designated hitter.” The crowd is still laughing when she adds, “I set up some ground rules for us, though—one, two, three strikes you’re out.”

  As Sam goes on, acting out bat swings and umpire signals where applicable, the cheering gets louder and louder. She destroys with puns on team names and then she closes with, “I don’t know why you’re at a pun competition, guys, you should go home—run!” It is such a simple pun, but she sounds joyful and self-aware, which makes it irresistible. Some guy in the front row yells “Boom!” as the room incinerates with laughter.

  When the clap-o-meter comes out, Sam pulls her drop-crotch pants up over her arms and runs around like a wildebeest. Sam trained as a performer in a theater that stressed physicality, translating emotion and vulnerability into gesture and movement. It’s part of what she brings to any stage she’s on. She gets a 10 for this turn, and she earns it.

  In the final round, Sam and Isaac end up facing off against each other, with Sam bouncing around like fireflies in a jar. Although it’s a close call, in the end, she wins. Even if she knows next to nothing about baseball, she knows how to play with words, and she knows how to sell them. If her puns ever come across as sweaty, it’s in a different way than Bob Belcher’s. Bob pours a gallon of elbow grease into cooking up puns, and Sam puts the same amount into serving them.

  10

  The Graffiti Castle

  There was a brief, flickering moment in which I thought a multiday drive from Brooklyn to Austin in a Prius full of punsters sounded like a blast. It was my most optimistic self: the guy who thinks maybe we won’t need a dinner reservation, and the next postreunion Pixies album might be a real game changer.

  That guy is almost always wrong.

  Ally had been on the same page, championing a deep-crew road trip with the pluck of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. But the more I thought about it, the clearer I saw the reality of the situation. We’d be trapped in an aluminum pun box for days, our monochrome crew’s Cracker Barrel puns getting more and more skin-crawly with every rest stop, like an actual barrel sluicing the stream of Niagara Falls, into word-twisty oblivion.

  When I float the road trip idea past Tim, he asks if I’m serious. I pretend I was not.

  We needed to decide on our travel plans soon, though. May was fast approaching, and with it the most intens
e week of punning imaginable. The week would commence with an especially high-caliber Punderdome to mark the show’s fifth anniversary. Fred and Jo invited back every champ in town for an all-star tournament, leaving only a couple spots open for newbies like myself. The week would then culminate in the O. Henry Pun-Off, although it was still a mystery who’d actually get to compete. After that, who knew? Maybe the NSA would need help decrypting an all-pun communiqué from ISIS and call on us like a latter-day Scooby gang. Anything was possible.

  Once the traction-less idea of a road trip was abandoned, we maneuvered through a labyrinth of e-mail threads to figure out a game plan. Everyone would be flying, not driving, but where would we stay? The Gwiazdowskis had a place lined up with their folks and their middle brother, Toby. Tim and his girlfriend, Meghan, would be holed up in a hotel on their own. But a cabal consisting of Ally, Nikolai, Isaac, Sam, Ariel, and myself were in for an airbnb, along with Max, the software engineer who tried to make a punning computer program. It only took one teeming Excel spreadsheet to home in on a spot. We were set.

  After e-mailing with O. Henry’s resident comptroller, I learned I was thirty-eighth on the wait list for Punslingers and twelfth for Punniest of Show. My chances of competing in the face-off portion of O. Henry were not so much circling the drain as having gone down it to live among the mole people, but the other event was potentially in reach. Still, it was hard to work up the antiprocrastination energy to put together a Punniest routine when I might not get to perform it. The event was two weeks away, and I hadn’t done more than preliminary brainstorming.

  All the recent O. Henrys were on YouTube in easily digestible chunks, so I’d seen loads of these routines by now. Like all pun-related happenings, they ran a gamut. Some were clever and powerfully delivered, but others were like supercuts of CSI: Miami one-liners: Detective Horatio Caine strolling around a morgue, making puns about each corpse one after the other. There are thirty-two total routines each year, so it takes something special to stand out. Ben Ziek’s past triumphant topics include Alcohol and Cheese, the crowd-pleaser’s crowd-pleasers. Perhaps mine didn’t need to please everyone, though, as much as it just needed to be recognizable and packed with lots of syllabically varied cue words. I started running through possibilities. Dog Breeds seemed fun. Anybody who doesn’t love dogs is a monster, so it was sure to get applause. But dogs as a topic might be too broad, and googling ideas for dog puns inevitably sent me down a k-hole of Unlikely Animal Friends. Soup was another prospect, but it was too narrow and thinking of so much soup at once made me want to barf. Another food idea, perhaps? What foods did I, a vegetarian, enjoy the most? Not vegetables, certainly, but there could be something to veggies as a topic. That might be appealing. So many choices, so much syllabic variance, so personal to me and my struggle to not eat bacon. Vegetables was a lush hanging garden of puns.

  I called Jerzy and asked him what he thought of the idea.

  “The rule for me is always pick a word set that’s well known but not at the forefront of people’s minds,” he said. “And that’s vegetables.”

  Jerzy was feeling pretty confident about his own routine, too. By doing a podcast for the past year, he and Jordan had been effectively writing a fresh Punniest of Show monologue each week. Although he won’t cop to what his topic will be this year, Jerzy says he had written the first version of it ten months before, for an episode of the podcast. It was one of six options he forced his play development workshop to listen to and give feedback on. After deciding on an option, he’d since been in the rewriting and refining stage for months. By now he had it down not quite as cold as his Social Security number but more like an old anecdote you haven’t told in a while.

  Ziek, on the other hand, came up with the puns for his topic, which he politely declines to disclose, about a month ago and has only started crafting them into a story this past week.

  The best Punniest of Show routines tend to have a narrative. With Jerzy’s blessing on the topic of veggies, I felt ready to harvest a story from my crop. It didn’t have to resemble in any way a good story, or even make sense, but the turns that resonated most always had a unifying theme beyond the topic. Ben Ziek considers romance the one thing everyone in the audience can relate to, so his stories were usually about dating. His cheese routine took the form of a literally cheesy love song, and his ode to alcohol told the tale of a barside wooing. Another champion who tended to focus on love is Big Poppa E, although his routines have historically explored just the physical act of love.

  In a way, putting together a Punniest of Show routine is like writing a poem, and performing it onstage is like crushing it at a poetry slam. Big Poppa E is a three-time Def Poetry Jam challenger and he was once the reigning slam poet at O. Henry. He’s also a gloriously ridiculous person. E is a white guy who sounds like a parody of a white guy imitating a black guy. He is also terminally horny. When he first decided to try his hand at O. Henry in 2006, E wrote a lewd routine filled with more double entendres than puns, and he ended up winning. The following years, his shtick became more divisive. No matter whether his topic was Candy Bars or Computers, it always turned into a tornado of dick and boob jokes, light on technical puns. Audiences loved these bawdy turns, but at least one judge always had a problem with them, and all it took was one low score to tank a turn. Eventually, these controversial turns ended up changing how the judges tally scores. E appealed to Gary Hallock to implement Olympics rules, which lop off the highest score and the lowest score and add up the remaining ones. Gary complied. The next year, though, when Big Poppa E turned in a clean routine about Harry Potter, audiences were less into it. That was the last time E competed at O. Henry.

  Five years later, he tells me he’s now ready to stage his O. Henry comeback this May.

  I was nowhere near ready, though. I still had to come up with some kind of vegetable story. But nothing sounded blander than a story about vegetables. Any child who’d suffered the scourge of VeggieTales videos growing up could attest to that fact. But what if there was a twist? A pandering twist! I could tell a story about Austin’s famous barbecue scene using all veggie puns. It might not be the most rad idea in the world, but it was radish. Now all I had to do was actually write the thing.

  Coming up with hundreds of potential puns for a routine is standard operating procedure for some champs. They worked hard on shaping the idea and worked just as hard to memorize it so it would come in under the time limit, fully polished. One former winner, Austin-based troubadour Southpaw Jones, set his Punniest of Show routine to song, and he put at least as much effort into it as one of his actual songs. Last year he compiled puns in his Evernote app for weeks, before massaging them into sentences. Then he went through this list and rated each pun with one to three stars. Only the three-star puns survived. Southpaw then whittled a karaoke track down to two minutes and worked out where all the key changes would have to go, so he could meticulously fine-tune the timing. His performance that year was the Whitney Houston National Anthem of O. Henry turns. He blew everyone else away.

  Southpaw says he isn’t putting quite that much effort into his performance this year, though. But maybe he’s just saying that, and he’s actually putting in even more effort this time. After watching untold hours of O. Henry videos and talking to dozens of performers, I now just assumed feverish overpreparation until proven otherwise.

  Tonight is the fifth anniversary all-star Punderdome. Only a few slots are up for grabs as far as nonchampions are concerned, and I have to hurry to claim one. I hustle down Fourth Avenue, beneath an ancient fort of green scaffolding attached to a crumbling tenement, past the odd luxury apartment. It’s not hot out yet, New York only lightly threatening to inflict summer on us, but my body is in sweaty rebellion all the same. As I approach Littlefield, twin fleets of monstrously toned runners from the nearby CrossFit do drills down either side of Degraw Street. They dodge me like a swarm of bees before running back in the other direction, perhaps to do a thousand “burpees” o
n a tractor wheel. They’ve got their cult, and I’ve got mine.

  Rekha is already on line, squatting with her back against the brick wall, wearing a hoodie with a rainbow stripe across it. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since my first Punderdome, which she expertly won. She’s been busy since, making funny videos for MTV, writing a spec pilot script, and touring with the Upright Citizens Brigade. Her Tuesdays have been spoken for in recent months, and she was lucky to make it tonight.

  For a while, it’s just us and a few other early birds on line. Rekha is telling me about a trip she took to China recently with her dad when Sam walks over, her hair in a messy bun like the giant ribbon on a gift. Soon, Sam is recapping the night she and Ally helped Jerzy generate a pun name to replace the now-retired Jargon Slayer moniker. His plan is to use a different name each month, and Sam’s favorite pick she’d put in contention is Hyper Bully. Mainly, though, she is excited about the shows she has coming up. She’s cohosting Previously On, a Mystery Science Theater 3000–type thing Nikolai has just started booking every month, and she’s starring in a fake TED Talk about the future (set in 1992), which she also wrote. Isaac is directing it.

  Making a pun is mostly just making connections, so it figures that pun competitions end up connecting people. Punderdome has facilitated a lot of creative collaborations in its first five years. Many regulars have ended up making videos or shows with Jo Firestone, for instance, including both Sam and Rekha, and Tim used to host a storytelling show in his loftspace, where he invited lots of punsters. One of the greatest champions ever, Brian Agler, a.k.a. Punda Express, had a fateful meeting here one night with John Pollack, author of The Pun Also Rises. In addition to writing the definitive book on puns, Pollack is a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, and he still has connections in the political sphere. While enjoying a postshow beer together, Brian mentioned to John that he was interested in speechwriting. It’s not solely because Pollack was impressed by his new friend’s punning ability that he reached out to a company in Washington, D.C., and put in a good word, but it didn’t hurt. Brian’s gain was Punderdome’s loss, though. By accepting the job, he had to move to D.C., thus ending Punda Express’s legendary run.