I can’t help myself. When there’s an opportunity to make a pun, and I’m in appropriate company to make it — I do. It slides out between my teeth before I can catch it.
Puns feel silly, nerdy, and luscious. People cringe or sigh or chuckle or roll their eyes — but they all love puns, too.
Growing up, I was the daughter of a Jewish New Yorker dad who was the king of puns. He loved to play with words - his bookshelf held pun books, humor tomes, crossword puzzle books, and classics like Tolkien. I remember one of his pun books had a story about how “people in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones” (because they might burn down), or the long joke that ends with a doctor telling his patient that “absinth makes the farts go HONDA”. Yes. I know. GROAN. But there’s something about puns that tickles our brains. They sink in and then it is like, wow, OK — such a silly, odd thing to change the words slightly and our minds can hear the new words writing over the real words and we can relate to both the new and the real words at the same time. It feels a bit like being in two places at once and one of them is funny.
Around my dad, whenever a word came up in conversation that could be used in a pun, or was a word in a song (especially beloved musicals) he would let the puns fly or sing a riff.
In my young adult years, after I’d heard every pun he ever mentioned at least 1,000 times I would groan when I heard them and even feel a twinge of embarrassment when my friends were around. But my friends thought he was funny and the puns were funny, and I realized maybe it wasn’t that embarrassing.
When I hear something that triggers a “dad would have said…” moment, sometimes I’ll look it up to get more context of where he might have gotten it from in the first place (often from Firesign Theater recordings).
The other day Monte and I were discussing getting repairs done on his e-bike tire — and I couldn’t help but start in to… “Porgy, Tirebiter, He's a spy and a girl delighter,
Orgie Firefighter! He's just a student like you. (Like Me?!)”.
For the unacquainted, here’s a link:
Thinking back, a year and a half now after his passing, I really miss my dad’s puns. In his final year or so, when the colorectal cancer had metastasized to his femur and his brain, he was so uncomfortable that he lost most of his light-heartedness and his puns disappeared. It was one of those things where you don’t fully realize how great something truly is until it is gone forever.
So now, I carry on the family tradition of being pun-y. If you are around me when I make a pun, you can be assured that I really like you a lot and I’m sharing my authentic, if not slightly embarrassing self. So go ahead and groan or giggle — and feel free to reuse the puns yourself when the moment arises.