Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  At the same moment, Tim rides by on a bicycle wearing a Canadian tuxedo, while Fred comes out to give away tonight’s golden tickets. Sam and Rekha don’t need one since they were officially summoned for this occasion. I happily accept mine.

  “Are any of you part of that group that’s going down to O. Henry?” Fred asks, absently tapping the remaining tickets at his side.

  “We are, but I don’t know if we’re gonna actually compete,” Sam says. “We’re on the . . .”—finger quotes here—“wait list.”

  Fred gives us a paternal smile and waggles his eyebrows.

  “Give ’em hell,” he says and continues canvassing the line.

  The rest of the O. Henry group gradually shows up once the bouncer starts letting us in. Ariel and Nikolai are talking with Sam, who is pantomiming climbing what looks to be a tree, for reasons I can’t discern. Isaac is at the bar, laughing alongside Jordan and an older woman with blond-gray hair who has an Expecto Patronum tattoo on her arm. I join the group and after a few minutes ask Jordan if he’s seen Jerzy yet.

  “I haven’t seen Jerzy in a month and a half,” he says, coolly.

  The last time the two were here, back in March, they’d lost as a team in the second round. Apparently, they’d both been extremely busy ever since, and no new episodes of Punk Assed have dropped in the meantime. Jordan has instead been auditioning for shows, and the burger joint he’s putting together in Astoria, Flattopps, was finally set to launch within the next month. I decide not to ask about the fate of the podcast.

  Usually some permutation of Punderdome’s deep catalog of champions shows up, but tonight they’re pretty much all here. Everyone I’d ever seen win and everyone I’d even heard about have all come out. The level of competition tonight is unprecedented. Whoever the human clap-o-meter is, they’re going to need a bat’s echolocational hearing in order to accurately call this one.

  By the time Fred and Jo start their warm-up routine, almost the entire O. Henry crew is huddled off to the side of the stage. We could all probably recite Fred’s puns verbatim at this point. In the past, I’ve spent this portion of the evening trying to turn mild dread into excitement, the most boring magical spell of all. (Accio Xanax!) Now I’m just curious to see what these people I’ve gotten to know over the past nine months are going to come up with. Everybody here puts their own unique tag on the antiquated architecture of language, like spraypainting the façade of some ornate building. By the end of the night, we’ll turn this place into a graffiti castle.

  “Now, how many people have been to a pun competition before?” Fred asks the crowd. “At some of these things, some individual, maybe a Ph.D. in linguistics or etymology evaluates the value of a pun and its philosophical underpinnings as an art. Who’s been to one of those competitions before?”

  The room is suddenly brimming with boos.

  “Well, we don’t do that shit around here, okay? We believe that we the people should decide!”

  It sounds like shots fired at the O. Henry judges, maybe some leftover sour grapes from the time Gary Hallock came here last fall and took Punderdome to task right onstage. Maybe it’s Fred trying to rile up everyone who is heading to Austin, his WWE mentality dividing the two competitions into heroes and heels. In any case, the crowd is responding to it with pep rally approval.

  “We’re gonna do something a little different this month,” Fred says. “This is our freakin’ fifth anniversary, we’ve got nothing but champions tonight, the best of the best, and we’re gonna bring ’em all out onstage before we get started.”

  The applause is 90 percent supportive and 10 percent fine but let’s hurry this along, please.

  One by one, everyone clustered around me heads onstage in ascending order of how many times they’ve won. The comedian who bested Isaac in March on his first try, the Pundance Kid, leads the pack. Ariel and Nikolai are next, since they’ve only begun to win recently. Groan Up, an older gentleman whose puns are closest in spirit to the essence of a cymbal rimshot, heads onstage, too, glasses perched on his nose, pants hiked up to his belly button. Ally, Jordan, Sam, and Isaac join in and they’re all clapping for one another and laughing like the cast call at the end of Saturday Night Live. As more champs emerge, the crowd sounds more impressed at the number of wins, cheers heightening into screams. Fred roars about Tim’s ten victories as though no higher number could exist.

  “This guy has changed names almost as much as he’s won, which is sixteen times,” Jo says. “I’m gonna bring him out by the name he has tonight: Quip Me, Baby, Bon Mot Time.”

  A shit-eating grin spreads across Jerzy’s face as he strides onstage. When the applause settles, Jo and Fred bring Rekha out last. She has sixteen wins, too, adding fuel to the friendly rivalry between her and Jerzy for Punderdome supremacy. There have been a total of sixty Domes so far, and these two combined have won more than half of them.

  “This is so cool for us, being up here with you guys; this is our family,” Fred says, garnering a chorus of sitcom awws.

  “Now I’m gonna go down the line—everybody say whether you’re single,” Jo says, holding the microphone out.

  Sentimentality defused, she shoos everyone offstage. The show is now underway.

  The first category of the fifth anniversary show is Italian Food. As the players start to write their puns, one of two twin sisters steps onstage to sing. Over the past few months, Punderdome has spawned a pair of official parodists who Weird Al Yankovize popular songs and make them about punning. While Wendy sings a version of “Piano Man” prepared especially for tonight, with a lot of the champs’ names thrown in, another famous Punderdome sibling, Jordan, gently sways to the song as he writes.

  Groan Up goes on first. “This place is packed,” he says. “I never sausage a crowd.”

  The charm of this elder pun statesman’s style is how shamelessly old-fashioned it is, a total throwback. Ariel is up next, and she gets things back on more of a modern track.

  “This guy once took me to dinner and said ‘meet balls,’” she says, pointing below the belt with both hands like an aircraft marshal. “I said ‘wine not’ . . . because I’m a pro sicko.”

  It’s hard not to be won over by Ariel. She’s so playful and so clearly enjoying herself, each pun followed by a barely suppressed laugh.

  One of the few nonchamps besides me is Punrequited Love, a tall, amused-looking dude with scraggly hair in a ponytail poof, who’s been at every show this year so far. Punrequited sounds exactly like he looks—like he just ingested a dense cloud of primo vape smoke. He starts off sluggish, but gets some laughs with a pun about his dream of cheating at award shows (“I think I could rig a Tony”).

  Jordan is up next, jostling his crimson jacket so the hood flies up over his head.

  “This is gonna be quick because I cannoli think of a few puns,” he says, making a face like he didn’t just make a pun, like he’s almost mad you suggested he did make a pun.

  “A lot of women out here tonight,” he notes, getting one sharp woo! from somewhere in the crowd. “The government wants to put its laws on your bodies,” he says, raising his voice and pounding his fist into his palm. “And I don’t want ’em to put their laws-on-ya!”

  Huge, eardrum-eviscerating cheers. Jordan just ensured his place in the next round.

  Over by the side of the stage, Ally, Jerzy, Sam, and I are all whispering Italian food puns to each other. (“How did scientists date anything before the carbon era?”)

  Now it’s Rekha’s turn. Jerzy straightens up to hear the first Punky Brewster puns since last October.

  “I don’t know if I can read this,” she says, waving her board a little. “I wrote teeny.”

  Jerzy smiles and claps like a rowdy Little League dad.

  “My friends Rick and Kasha were supposed to be here tonight, and Rick-oughtta be here, but honestly: fuck Kasha!”

  The rest of her turn is framed as an extended middle finger to the detested, imaginary Kasha. The crowd savors ever
y second of it.

  Despite Punrequited Love’s enthusiastic pleading for applause, during which he chugs an entire beer and crushes the can against his head, Ariel, Jordan, and Rekha move forward.

  Next is an appealingly broad category: Wild Animals.

  Isaac is up first and he starts off with the typical Punder Enlightening scorched earth offensive—five or six puns just about bears in the first thirty seconds. They come so fast and unrelenting it feels like the audience never stops cheering.

  “I’m not sure if just one pun about wild birds can win this round, but perhaps two can,” he says. “But if I don’t win, I don’t give two fox.”

  This line absolutely obliterates the room. Isaac can’t resist and takes an actual bow before rejoining the line.

  “That was a perfect closer,” I yell into Jerzy’s ear.

  “I’ve heard him do better,” he yells back, shrugging.

  The next team, 1–2 Punch, has a tight turn. It would definitely get them to the next round any other month. Words Nightmare and Forest Wittyker are still on deck, though, so they’re not out of the woods yet.

  Fred calls Ally next and she walks out, adjusting her glasses, little half smile, pulling at one sleeve of a cable-knit sweater.

  “A lot of animals have been taken already, and I hope I don’t para-peat too many,” she says, making a face like she just splashed a pan of Bolognese sauce on a lady of affluence. The crowd laughs and Ally smiles.

  “My peer, Anna, and I? We’re actually the same cup size; we’re co-bra partners.”

  Sam pumps her fist in the air next to me as cheers ring out. Ally finishes up with a couple of sex puns in a row, including the unavoidable riff about woodpeckers that was destined to emerge this round, and then she walks away from the mic.

  When it’s his turn, finally, Tim looks breathless from the first, sweaty and uncertain. He’s going to have to dig deep to find unclaimed animals rather than put different spins on the Noah’s Ark that has already trotted by. Tim never seems to use prompts other people have already uttered, though.

  “There was something I was gonna ox you about,” he says and makes a puzzled face. “Wait, rhino the answer. I was gonna ox you about this animal running around by the bar. I thought it was a dog but it was a meerkat.”

  The crowd is on his side. It’s classic Forest Wittyker; conversational rather than jokey, milking the cheesiness of each pun without hitting it too hard. It’s his strongest showing I’ve witnessed. He, Ally, and Isaac move on to the next round.

  In the final heat of the first round, Jo calls my name. It’s a stacked lineup of five champions—and me. It’s the most champs in any one round tonight, maybe ever—and also me. I glare at my whiteboard like if I look hard enough I’ll see words beamed in from the future. The category is TV Shows.

  Considering the approximately six million TV shows currently airing on every conceivable network, streaming service, and menswear blog, this should be a breeze. But for some reason, I have just as hard a time picking titles out as I do choosing something to watch. Damn you, infinite content!

  Of all the shows that flash through my brain, it’s impossible to explain why I write down the ones I do. Going obscure is a reliable strategy, but there’s no reason to drag John from Cincinnati into this. Was Buck Rogers even a TV show? I don’t know, but I definitely write it down. My pen doesn’t stop moving until whichever pun twin is onstage stops singing.

  Pundance Kid is up first; a big, squinty grin on his close-shaven, ovoid head. Although he’s just as confident as last time, his turn is far weaker. Perhaps the level of gameplay tonight is so elevated it makes his puns look threadbare beneath his stand-up’s delivery. Either way, he has way more misses than hits.

  Sam is up next, and at first she fares no better, but then she gets revved up, and the room caves in to her.

  “I like to put all my gnomes in a line, ever create some lawn order?” she asks and gets a deluge of cheers.

  “Ever make a bunch of robot cameras in the sky fight and play a game of drones?” she asks, finding a groove with questions. The crowd stays with her the rest of her turn.

  There’s one pun I’m excited to do when Fred calls my name, but I can’t open with it, so I start by following Sam’s lead and asking a question: “Wire we all here?”

  The audience laughs and my mind is scrambling. I need an answer for this. I look out and only see the bright light, something I was grateful for at first, for making me feel less nervous. It’s like I’m telling puns to a Tinker Bell who either laughs or doesn’t. Now I just feel disconnected from the crowd. Why are we here? My mind goes blank and I look beyond the light and see people waiting, but instead of going deeper into the panic, I just say the next dumb pun that pops in my head.

  “We’re here for growing puns,” I yell. There’s a comedown from the previous laugh. It’s a False Alert pun of the highest order. But surely better than had I stood there for a few more seconds not saying anything. Time to bring out the big guns.

  “My only fear about going down on an alien from Melmac is Alf all on my face.”

  Once the words leave my lips, and the uncertain applause rolls in, I wonder why I thought this pun was going to kill. It’s pretty gross, even by Punderdome standards. The audience doesn’t love it, but I hear Sam howling over my shoulder, and I’m satisfied. I get through a few more puns and go out on a laugh.

  When Nikolai is up, he uses The Wire as a prompt, too, but takes it another way.

  “Have you seen that show where a guy just asks ‘why?’ over and over: The Why-er?”

  He uses a bunch of equally silly puns, his voice zigzagging. For some reason, I notice he’s wearing one red sock and one yellow sock, like hot dog condiments. At one point he looks down at the front row and asks, “Would you guys say you’re six feet under me or maybe a little less?”

  The crowd whoops so loud he might as well stop there.

  Jerzy is up last, and he strides to the microphone looking eminently unruffled.

  “Cheers,” he says, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  His turn is going typically well and as he gets further on a roll, his confidence transforms into cockiness.

  “I feel like I have the benefit of going last because the guy who goes farther knows best what puns to do,” he says, triggering a wave of awe from the audience.

  “But I’m pretty sure I’m gon’ smoke the competition,” he says, closing his round out to colossal applause. Of course he’s voted on, and so are Nikolai and Sam.

  The next round is another tsunami of silliness. Jordan has the best turn in the first heat, but Isaac, Nikolai, Ariel, and Sam seem deadlocked to join him. After a seriously close applause audit, Nikolai gets the nod. If that choice was like deciding which of your childhood pets you love best, though, the next round is like choosing a favorite parent.

  On the category of American Presidents, Rekha, Ally, Jerzy, and Tim push past any potential second-round brain drain and deliver epic sets. It’s impossible to objectively choose a winner. Tonight’s clap-o-meter, a guy named Eric, has the pensive look of a royal food taster as he probes the nuances between each person’s respective applause. Jerzy is safe for sure (he got a 10), but either Rekha or Ally is tainted (both get 9.5s). It’s down to a clap-off, and one that is just as difficult to differentiate as before, if not more so. Eric’s read of the applause somehow rings as accurate, though. He picks Ally. Rekha looks briefly devastated, but catches herself, and claps for those moving on.

  Fred and Jo should put Eric on salary and make him the clap-o-meter every month.

  In the semifinals, the category is Brooklyn, and it’s such a niche topic that everybody seems a little shook. They’re all crouched into squats, boards against knees, brows deeply furrowed. Nikolai has scant ammunition, and he struggles with it. There’s a familiar jokey desperation in Ally’s voice, but it sounds less and less stagy as she goes along. She hasn’t made it past the second round this year until now, and the existential
crisis surrounding her career is still ongoing—it’s hard to tell where her nervous act ends and reality begins. What probably puts the Gwiazdowski brothers over the top, beyond strong turns on a tough category, is that they both manage to make Lin-Manuel Miranda puns during the last gasp of Hamilton-mania’s unshakable chokehold on New York in 2016.

  “You found the brothers!” Jo yells to the clap-o-meter, when he selects the winners from behind a blindfold.

  There are apparently a lot of Punk Assed listeners in the audience because the cheers are deafening. Jordan shadowboxes his way to the front of the stage, and then he and Jerzy grin at each other. They’re about to do what they do every week on their podcast, and what they just may end up doing at O. Henry, if one of them manages to defeat Ben Ziek before the final round.

  “Two minutes are on the clock,” Fred says. “Your topic is Animals. Wild animals, domestic animals, barnyard animals, anything and everything—go!”

  Jerzy speaks first, immediately. “I don’t care who wins but I hope you laugh at ocelet.”

  “And to think,” Jordan says in a withering voice. “I spent my whole childhood fawning over your puns.”

  Two minutes pass with nary a pause. Neither brother seems to need a moment to think between turns. Everybody is screaming by the time Jo ends the round. A chant for two more minutes breaks out and she obliges.

  “Two more minutes—same topic!”

  The puns resume right away, blasting back and forth like British naval warfare. After nearly a minute, Jordan stumbles.

  “What’s an animal,” he wonders aloud, laughing a little but also losing time. “Oh, hey, am I turning pale here, what’s my hue, man?