Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  At one point, a lightly bearded guy with a huge smile squats near our end of the table and introduces himself as Jonah Spear. He’s impressed that we’ve all come down from Brooklyn and wants to tell us about the pun competition he founded in San Francisco earlier this year. The Bay Area Pun-Off was apparently pulling 150 people each time out, just a few months in. It had taken off so quickly, Jonah was now planning to spin it off into a splinter cell: the New York Pun-Off.

  “What?” Max says and gives Jonah a skeptical look. “What about Punderdome?”

  “I know, I know,” Jonah says, raising a placating hand. “Hey, there are a lot of plays in New York and nobody’s like, ‘You can’t do a play, I’m already doing a play.’”

  He has a point.

  The pun games continue for the next hour or so, with different combinations of hosts and contestants. Eventually, Ariel is up against the Elizabethan-clad Punster of the Year in the final game. During the climactic round, when Ariel and the other players get forty seconds to write down a pun on the category of presidential candidates, Nikolai and Ally sing the Friends theme song to make her feel more at home. Ariel wins. It’s not even close. Someone from Punderdome had won every single game tonight. Winning some warm-up pun games is far from the night’s big honor, though.

  The International Punster of the Year is the closest thing there is to becoming a made man in the pun Mafia (the punderworld). Last year, the honor went to Brian Oakley, who talked my ear off about pun strategy and knives when I was here a few months ago. Before that, it went to Steve Brooks, another retired former champion who is now active on the organizational committee and who will be one of the MCs tomorrow. Ben Ziek will clearly get the nod one day, too. Probably also Jerzy. This year, it’s actually two punsters: Andy Balinsky, who has earned four medals over years of grinding it out at O. Henry, and Julie Balinsky, his wife, who organized this year’s lottery system. These two were made for each other.

  Several speeches follow, and then the award is finally offered, courtesy of prolific pun book author Stan Kegel, who has thick black glasses and an abruptly truncated Santa beard.

  “Heh!” Gracie says, with a snort-laugh. I look over at her, my eyebrows raised, and she shrugs and repeats, “Kegel.” I reach out and give her a very low high five.

  Everybody from our group is looking at their phones by now. Ariel, Nikolai, and Ally are doing Snapchat face swaps, while Max and I text with Jerzy and Jordan, who are restless at the Best Western, wanting to meet up. I catch some of the older punsters looking at us with well-I-never bewilderment.

  “Are you guys gonna go out on the town after this?” Gracie asks. “Can I tag along?”

  “Of course!” Nikolai says, a bit too eagerly. A few minutes later, we start to slip out one by one. Just before I leave Opal Divine’s, though, I remember something. One-half of the Punster of the Year duo, Julia, is in charge of the lottery system. Maybe she has an update on whether I’ve made it. I slink back inside, kneel beside her table, and congratulate her on tonight’s honor.

  “Thanks!” she says. “And thank you for coming down all the way from New York.”

  “I was also wondering,” I say, cutting to business, “if you could check my current status on the wait list by any chance.”

  “There have been a lot of dropouts, so you might be in luck,” she says, scrolling through her phone. I feel my stomach tighten as she continues to look.

  Suddenly, Julia’s eyes narrow.

  “You’re number two on the list!” she chirps. “I can’t say for sure, but you should probably come prepared.”

  This is excellent news. It’s all happening. If I get in, maybe Ally, Sam, Ariel, and Nikolai have a chance, too. Maybe this really will turn into the great Punderdome versus O. Henry showdown it’s been shaping up to be all along.

  12

  Punniest of Show

  After leaving the banquet, we rescued the car-less Gwiazdowski brothers from the Best Western, where they were stuck with their parents, and went to a bar in the Rainey district called Craft Pride. It’s a red wooden house adorned with Christmas lights and an overwhelming beer selection whose options, like Devil’s Backbone and More Cowbell, sound like strains of weed or hot sauce. We settled into a wooden deck area, the ground covered in pebbles, with petrified tree stumps for tables.

  “I hear you’re one of us,” Isaac says with a smile when he meets Gracie.

  “Maybe y’all are like me,” she says, scrunching up her nose.

  Jordan is wearing dirty white jeans cut off at the shin, and he’s letting Ariel and Ally draw on them with a Sharpie.

  Inevitably, someone yells out “Beer Movies,” priming the pun pump. Gracie looks confused a moment later as the beer-infused titles spew forth with volcanic force.

  “How do you play?” she asks.

  “Just say a pun,” Jordan says.

  And for the rest of the night, we all did.

  I wake up early on Saturday and take my laptop to Starbucks to finish writing my Punniest of Show routine, a narrative constructed almost entirely of vegetable puns. After spending a half hour on a pepper run that concludes with “ah-been-near-yo but now I wanna be all-up-in-yo,” and deciding against it, I go out for some fresh air. It’s time to memorize the gist of what I’ve come up with. If I make it into the competition, I’ll figure out everything beyond the words—the inflection, tone, hand gestures, and whatever else—while I’m onstage. For now, I just need to walk around the empty morning streets of downtown Austin and recite my routine out loud like a total lunatic.

  As it gets closer to noon, I head over to Brush Square, near the O. Henry Museum, where the Pun-Off will be held. The Pecan Street Festival is just setting up, with enterprising artists mounting rows of white tents like a shantytown outside of Voodoo Donuts, getting ready to unload their wares. Just in front of the museum, there’s a Lone Star flag–colored trash barrel with don’t mess with texas written on it, a reminder that Austin is like a tumor of coolness within a greater, Rick Perry–governed body. The registration table in the neighboring Susanna Dickinson Museum is inside a small room with wooden floors. A pair of bedpans sits atop the table, full of numbered stickers for each of the competitors. (The stickers for Punniest of Show are blue, and the ones for Punslingers are red.) At the end of the table sits Julia Balinsky, whom I approach and ask whether I’ve made it in.

  “Well, you’ve climbed to number one on the wait list, but you’re not quite there yet,” she says. Her eyes are either apologetic or sympathetic, but it doesn’t look good.

  “Why don’t you leave me your phone number, though,” she adds, “so I can send you a message if we have another dropout?”

  I jot down a row of digits and leave. On my way to go find food, I see Jerzy pacing near a merch table, unbuttoned chambray shirt flapping in the breeze, one arm in the air like a DJ hyping the crowd. His lips are moving, eyes focused intensely on nothing. Somehow, it feels more intimate and voyeuristic to see him in this state than if I’d caught him with his pants down. I hightail it out of there.

  Jerzy is not alone, though. Many other dudes are pacing around, talking to themselves, as I cut through Brush Square. One guy with muttonchops and fat, rolled-up jean cuffs is reciting lines out of a notebook when he walks right into a tree. Without even looking up from his notes, he backs up slowly and then proceeds forward again, like a homonym-zombie.

  Fiddle-heavy folk music drifts through the park, entertaining the crowd before the puns begin. The band is playing on a stage that rises only a couple feet off the ground, inside an enormous pavilion, the words O. Henry Pun-Off behind them in a font that looks like sloppy red paint set against a yellow oval. The old-school county fair ambiance is only broken by all the signs promoting the event’s websites and Facebook pages and hashtags, though perhaps fairs have those now, too. Subaru-size speakers sit on either side of the band, with smaller siblings out in the crowd, slung over a huge tree branch like the trunk is wearing headphones. Reams of yel
low police tape outline the entire tent area, perhaps someone’s idea of a joke about a linguistic crime scene.

  Ten minutes before the O. Henry begins, I’m alone at Juiceland, wolfing down a spicy quinoa wrap and banana peanut butter smoothie. When my phone buzzes, I’m sure it’s Ally or Sam asking where I am, but it isn’t. It’s a text from Julia:

  Come to the Registration Desk. You’re in!

  I’m already out the door and running before my half-finished quinoa wrap hits the bottom of the trash bin. I head back to the museum and fish out my number from one of those bedpans, thanking Julia profusely all the while.

  “You’re number two, though, and they’re getting started right now,” she says, “so you’d better get out there!”

  I thank her over my shoulder as I run off toward the stage. On my way out of the museum, I see Arlen, the old guy from last night’s banquet, and he sees me, too.

  “Give ’em hell!” he bellows, as I hurry off. “Do it for the Jews!”

  On my way toward the giant tent, I bump into Ariel and Nikolai. Ariel has a red sticker on her shirt—she made it into Punslingers! She notices my blue sticker at the same time, and we hug. Nikolai is, unfortunately, stickerless. I want to ask him if there’s any hope, but since Gary Hallock and David Gugenheim have already taken the stage, I don’t have time to chat. Nikolai points toward the area beneath the pavilion where they’ve set up base camp, and I give a thumbs-up as I speed off.

  While I head toward the row of stageside porta-potties, old-guard champion Steve Brooks addresses the crowd. With his trim eggshell beard, he reminds me of a Scottish Terrier in a straw hat. Soon, he leads the crowd in a call-and-response definition of the word pun: “A pun is the humorous use of a word or words in such a way as to suggest different meanings or applications or words with the same sound but different meanings.”

  The O. Henry Pun-Off has officially begun.

  The first contestant in Punniest of Show is a guy named Steven, who is fully decked out in athleisure wear, one sweatpant leg hiked up à la mid-’90s LL Cool J. His routine is about the joys of living in Austin, an early contender for Panderingest of Show. He calls Barton Springs, where we went swimming yesterday, an “Uber Pool,” etc., and so forth. A minute and a half into his routine, the timekeeper blows an airhorn, and then at two minutes a bell dings. Steven has to stop. He had no idea that the six judges aren’t necessarily all from Austin, and local-leaning routines are unofficially frowned upon. He gets wall-to-wall 7s, which are tallied Olympic style. With the highest and lowest scores lopped off, he gets a 28/40, setting a fairly low hurdle for everyone else to clear.

  “Thank you, Steven, for being among the honorary cannon fodder today,” Gary says.

  This is maybe the last thing I want to hear just before my name. Cannon fodder. When Gary does announce me a moment later, I bolt onstage and take my sunglasses off to look out into the crowd. It’s a totally different view than Punderdome, where you only see those bright lights. Here I can see everything. Vape pens galore—like shiny pan flutes at a Ren faire—bleach-faded jam band tees, picnic cheese sweating in the sun, a complete topography of balding heads like a chart of eclipse stages, rows and rows of collapsible tailgate chairs, bunched-up bodies glued to the ground, every kind of beard, every kind of sunglasses, more kinds of cargo shorts than denim scientists ever imagined. It is a lot to process.

  The entire Punderdome crew screams when Gary introduces me as the second cannon fodder of the day. But something about being called that brings me back to the moment onstage in Montreal, where I’d sort of thrown myself under a bus being driven by T.J. Miller. Back then, I’d felt too outclassed to say anything funny in my own defense. This time, circumstances had conspired to put me on early in the day, before the audience was acclimated to being punned at in the Texas heat. It was up to me to get this crowd on my side. I could be the cannon fodder, or I could push the canon farther. Ugh, I was incapable of not thinking in puns at this point. Lock me up and throw away the key.

  “He came down here all the way from New York, so no pressure,” David adds, smiling. “Start whenever you’re ready.”

  I take a deep breath, and feel the heft of my routine under my tongue, like the words can’t wait to come out. Let’s do this.

  “So, ordinarily I’m a vegetarian, but Austin is famous for its food, so here’s a story about experimenting while I’m in town. I’ll end this corny intro here endive right in.”

  Only the faintest chuckles ring out. They don’t know whether they like me yet, but that’s fine.

  “Olive oil god’s creatures, but I’m arugula guy and I don’t turnip my nose at a meaty meal.”

  The crowd is laughing now, already, and it starts to feel more like Punderdome. Things go a little rocky for a while. I have a really forced way of mentioning “Mambo No. 5” crooner Lou Bega, just so I can say that something he did was “rude-a Bega,” and that’s when the microphone shorts out for the first time. The equipment is turning against me. What would it take for this to count as a technical foul so I can start over? It’s too late for that, though. They’ve already heard the beginning, so I have to keep going and do the best I can. The microphone cuts out again right on a punch line about how the sound of chickens is my bok joy, but it gets a laugh anyway.

  Just after a run of mushroom puns, the airhorn sounds. Shit, I’m not going to be able to get through this whole routine. I must have been talking like a meth-addled sportscaster while walking around downtown earlier, when it fit under two minutes. Well, either that or I’m talking like Harry Caray on elephant tranquilizers now. Either way: I’m not going to make it. I call an audible and skip over a whole section about tomatoes.

  Toward the end, what I feared most would happen, happens. After I say “they swish chard order with another table,” my mind goes completely blank. There’s no time to summon the words back. I have to speak. Now! I repeat the Swiss chard line again, and this time I do magically recover the next line: “Stop gherkin us around.”

  The bell dings, but the words are rolling off my tongue like a freight train after recovering my thought, so I croak out one more line: “This is your fennel warning.”

  David gives me a look like I’m not very bright, the effect of which is lessened because he has snot coming out of his nose.

  “It was a good routine, but unfortunately it didn’t come in under two minutes,” he says. “I’m afraid it doesn’t count.”

  Oh man. What I had just done was like a slap in the face to everyone who was prepared but didn’t make it on the list. All that effort and I wasn’t going to even get a score.

  “The judges should score it anyway, though,” Gary adds, and I let out a deep breath.

  The six judges sit in a row to the left of the stage, looking alert. A pigtailed, possibly hungover Gracie Deegan is slumped over on one end, and tiny Arlen is sitting in on the other side, making the judges’ collective head height a bell curve. In the middle are circa 2016 Glenn Danzig, an anchorwoman, a guy who definitely owns a novelty apron for family barbecues, young George H. W. Bush, and the male half of the American Gothic painting. When Gary gives the go-ahead for them to score me, the numbers start flying up: 9, 8, 10, 9, 8, 9. It’s a 35 out of 40, a very respectable score.

  I did it. I came to this strange place, just barely made it into the competition, and did well. Maybe if I’d known for sure I’d be competing, I would’ve spent more time crafting the perfect routine. Maybe it couldn’t have worked out any other way.

  As I make my way to meet everyone else beneath the tent, I bump into Jerzy, which reminds me that while this moment may have been the pinnacle of my pun journey, it was still the very beginning of a long, fateful day for everyone else.

  “I’m not up for a while, so I’m gonna take off,” he says. “But I heard your turn and you did great—nines and tens!”

  “Thanks!” I say. “Just out of curiosity, where are you going?”

  “I’m just gonna go pace somewhere and m
aybe cut down my routine,” he says.

  And off he goes, like a knight clamoring to fortify the castle before attack. A few random people congratulate me as I walk through the crowd. Tim and Meghan clap me on the back on their way to the empanada truck. Finally, I stumble upon everybody beneath the tent, scattered around in an erratic grid, and they give me a hero’s welcome—the first Punderdomer to perform at O. Henry this year. Then I settle in for the long haul.

  Punniest of Show is a whirligig of wordplay, as one person after another gets up to perform. There are booming southern voices and gentle tepid testimony. Puns about football, puns about politics, puns in Spanish, each of the four kinds of Bad Puns. Because they’re only two minutes apiece, though, they mostly flow by at a brisk pace.

  One thing that’s inescapable is the sight of nervous people in cargo shorts. An hour in, it’s clear there are as many ways to be nervous onstage as there are kinds of cargo shorts:

  There’s the stiff-legged headlight deer; feral and cornered and soon to become taxidermy

  The incredible vanishing man, whose body is angled sideways to leave less exposed surface area

  The leaky faucet, with sweat expanding into shirt-archipelagos

  The heavy-breather, eyebrows arched heavenward like why is this happening?

  The stuttery, resting glitch face, like a worshipper trying to speak in tongues but grasping at straws

  The accidental pop-and-locker, with jerky, pelvic jitters, microphone shaking like a paint-mixer

  And the poker face pretender who ends up running off the stage like he’s being chased by God

  This is what happens when a rabble of introverts finally gets to do something they love and realizes they have to do it in front of a crowd. Some learn something new about themselves while others confirm something they’ve always feared.