Puns are great—except when they’re not great. And, unfortunately, most of the puns we come across in our daily lives—like those concocted by newspaper or magazine sub-editors, are tripe.
The truly great puns go down in history and are related over and over again. For example, there’s this classic of Dorothy Parker’s:
Challenged by one of her verbal sparring partners to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker came up with
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.
Perhaps the most brilliant pun of all—because it needed only one word—was the classic (oops, pun there) message attributed to Sir Charles Napier* supposedly sent to London in 1843 after his capture of the Indian province of Sind:
Peccavi.
(Non-Latinists are encouraged to Google this word.)
*
During a few of the many idle moments that we all have now, I have come up with—what I think is—an exquisitely subtle pun (so exquisitely subtle that I believe resorting to Google will be necessary, the pun touching on vastly different areas of knowledge). If, because of social distancing, no one will come up and pat me on the back for the pun, at least everyone else will be out of rotten-tomato-throwing range.
At one point in the 1920s, during the baseball off-season, the leading batsman—nicknamed The Sultan of Swat—was hired to do a turn on the vaudeville stage. He enlightened the rapt audiences with demonstrations of his batting stance and his magnificent swing.
Unfortunately, his act was preceded by a pair of Irishmen who blarneyed their way through a series of moldy tales about the Auld Sod, and was followed by a couple of kilted Scots telling haggis jokes and singing (after a fashion) Robbie Burns songs.
The whole thing may be summed up as a case of Ruth amid the alien corn.
***
* Research has shown that the pun was apparently coined by A. N. Other.
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