The definition of a pun
A few months ago, I had a very proud moment – my three year
old son made his first pun. We were on our way home from a long day at
pre-school: the traffic was bad, the car was hardly moving, and my son was
getting bored. We tried I-spy, then a guessing game, then even I got bored so I
started telling him about traffic jams and how and why they happen - anything
to pass the time.
Well it didn’t happen until the next morning, when I had long
forgotten our captivating chit-chat into the origins of road congestion, but I
asked him, as I usually do, what he wanted on his toast. With a big grin on his
face, he replied, “Daddy, can I have some traffic jam”.
Now, for a guy who runs a pointless blog consisting of funny
pictures, regurgitated quotes and bad puns, at that moment I didn’t know
whether to laugh or cry. I couldn’t believe it. Was this his first pun?
But I wanted to make sure, so I asked him again, leading him
slightly away from the joke, “What do you want on your toast, some jam?”
He said “No, I don’t want jam, can I have some traffic jam?”
His grin even bigger.
The pun confirmed, my heart breaking with unmitigated joy.
Balloons fell from the ceiling, confetti popped out of the toaster, and
Handel’s messiah started playing on the radio***.
So what did I do? Like any proud parent, I started telling
people about my son’s first foray into puns and punnage. But here is the
problem – while some of the people I told were suitably impressed (or at least
made out they were) others were not so impressed, with at least two people
questioning its paronomasian validity (one actually said “Not bad, although
it’s not really a pun is it?”).
Now, although I am not a linguistic scholar, I thought I
knew a pun when I heard one. But it turns out you can categorise puns in a
whole lot of different ways.
First, there is the homophonic pun, which takes two words
that sound the same but have different meanings (Atheism is a non-prophet institution), or the homographic pun, which exploits words that are
spelled the same but have a different meaning (Corduroy pillows are making
headlines). Then there are the compound puns (Where do you find giant snails?
On the ends of giants’ fingers.), and the double sound puns (Gone Chopin, Bach
in a Minuet). And this is even before getting into the chiasmus (Never let a
fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you) the implied chiasmus (Times fun when you’re having flies - Kermit the frog),
or the spoonerisms, daffynitions, or the malapropisms.
So back to my son’s request for some traffic jam on his
toast. Does this fit into one of the categories? Perhaps some type of compound
homographic pun? I’m not so sure, but to be honest I don’t really care. It was
some type of joke - deliberate, intentional, groan-worthy, and as I’ve always
said:
A good pun is its own reword.
*** The
balloons, confetti and music may or may not have happened.
3 comments :
I still remember my youngest son making his first pun. It was a homophonic pun. I was telling him to put on his shoes, and he started flapping his arms around at imaginary flies going "shoo, shoo".
Mind you, he was at that stage pretending not to understand a lot of what we said. Hard to believe when he starts making puns.
Eek, perhaps because of all the recent headlines to do with same-sex marriage, I at first read 'homophonic' as 'homophobic', and was thinking that listing examples of homophobic puns on your blog would be straying into dangerous territory...
I don't care what sort of pun it was, as his grandfather I think it was very clever indeed. This is, of course, a totally unbiased comment.
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