Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions

Waterboarding the English language

Puns are bottomless. Comedian Steve Allen used to collect the so-called best and publish them in books, but he knew he could never have the definitive collection, because they just kept coming. At the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, the best and the brightest vied to outdo each other, for about ten years. Given a word, they had to employ it in a sentence. From this came such deathless utterances as: We wish you a meretricious and a happy new year. Now, there is a small non-chain of pun events all over the USA, where people pay to be tortured by contestants who fly in from around the world. It’s the new millennium.

Away With Words follows the punning of a cadre of New Yorkers on this non-circuit. show more They work out locally, and make the road trip to Austin where the oldest US event is their World Series of punning. The book reads like a television reality show. It progresses chronologically, episode after episode, has the same setbacks and euphoric moments, the same angst and second-guessing, and culminates in Oz. It is mostly background, mostly detail, mostly description, with several bouts of thick action interspersed. You get to know the contestants, possibly more than you wanted to, just like reality tv, and you get to read endless puns.

Two things about the puns. Because these are performance contests, they are intense personal efforts, not simply tossed off, unexpected witticisms in conversation. Sometimes they are too intense. Be prepared to read a pun and not get it. (A lot of it has to do with delivery and timing, and books are not the best medium for that.) Sometimes the contestants actually have to explain the pun to the judges or the audience, which is a real buzz-kill. The other thing is what Joe Berkowitz correctly calls pun fatigue. Twenty puns in a row on the same topic can be, can I say – punishing.

Berkowitz learns the ins and outs, eventually moving up a notch in the hierarchy of winners. He has entered a tiny universe unknown to most mortals, and like its television equivalents, this show is an education in how this microuniverse works, warts and all. The bottom line appears to be that standup comics or people who use mental dexterity in what they do and how they live make for naturally performing punsters. They are more observant, and quicker with associations. They have honed attitudes and timing that can lift a bad pun into a shriek of laughter. So it’s not necessarily something just anyone can take up and succeed with. Fortunately.

David Wineberg show less

If you're going to read about obsessive word play competitions, I'd recommend Word Freak on Scrabble competitions instead. That's an experience. This book is reasonably well written, but once you know what competitive punning is about, there's not much more to learn. I did enjoy the discussion of the TV shows @Midnight and Bob's Burgers, where the puns were/are actually funny. But what this mainly demonstrates, over and over, is that generating puns in high quantity in short time does not lead to anything all that interesting.

Bill Watterson, in his Calvin and Hobbes strip, gave Calvin magazines on gum chewing to mock the niche magazine industry (An exchange...Hobbes: "I can't believe there's a magazine for gum chewers." Calvin: "Heck, there must be at least a dozen such magazines. ... Each appeals to a different faction. 'Chewing is high gloss, literate and sophisticated. 'Gum Action' goes for the gonzo chewers. 'Chewers Illustrated' aims at the vintage gum collectors, and so on. ... Each one encourages you to think you belong to an elite clique, so advertisers and appeal to your ego and get you to cultivate an image that sets you apart from the crowd. It's the divide and conquer trick." {excited face}. H: "I wonder what happened to the melting pot." C: show more "There's no money in it.") Obscure? I read Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein, in part about extreme memory competitions. Talk about obscure...

And then there's this...about pun competitions.

I am an inveterate punster (yes, I could have said in vertebrate...), so when I saw this, I had to read it. It was painful. I love a well-crafted story leading up to a beautiful groaner of a pun. These competitions are about rapid fire punning to random categories. The champs groan them out and the audience response clap-o-meter determines who wins them. Berkowitz litters his narrative with examples.

Painful.

I'll stick to my Feghoots. show less

I really love this kind of microhistory (I think that might be the correct genre?). Basically I love learning about tiny niche hobby communities and the people who inhabit them. And this is the nichest of the niche -- who even knew pun competitions existed? I certainly didn't, despite having lived for several years apparently just a short distance from one of the main sites of such competitions in Brooklyn, NY. And there's another site in Milwaukee? I repeat, who knew?

When I get a chance, I will sit down and rewrite this review to contain a suitable number of puns. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at being punny on the fly.

Some people like puns. Some people hate puns. And some people absolutely LOVE them. AWAY WITH WORDS is about the third group.
Last fall, my daughter and daughter-in-law gave my husband a game called Punderdome. Two words are drawn from a deck and the players have a short time to think of puns utilizing those words. The winners are those who come up with the best ones. Our pun party was very lively and a lot of fun.
Punderdome is also the name for a Brooklyn-based pun competition, one of several such gatherings in the US. Jay Berkowitz is an active participant. AWAY WITH WORDS tells how the competitions are formed, how they operate, and how people prepare to compete in them. It’s a lot more intense than most people would expect.
The show more participants get to know each other because of their frequent interaction. Many of the punsters work as writers for tv shows, movies, or newspapers or comedians. Some newspapers thrive on utilizing puns in their headlines and stories. At the competitions, a category is announced and the contestants have ninety seconds to come up with as many puns as they can. They then present them to live audiences and are judged by the audience’s response.
The latter half of the book has many examples of winning (and some not so funny) entries.
Since there is so much overlap among the competition and the competitors, the book does become repetitious show less

At the end of the author's year-long exploration of puns and competitive punning, he felt somewhat let down and was ready for a break from wordplay. I kept asking myself why anyone would ever feel anything but let down after spending a year working at pun-making. It's supposed to be fun!

4/5