A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (8 page)

When I got to the mailbox and opened it up, I was startled to find that it contained nothing but trophy after trophy. And they were for you! See, trophies did not cease being awarded when you turned eight and stopped playing soccer. You’ve been secretly getting them all your life! They just had the wrong address for you.

Your prizes finally came for:

• Letting it go
  
• Not telling a story even though you had a really good story that was going to blow everyone out of the water because it was clear the evening was winding down at that point
  
• Letting that lady into your lane
  
• Intending to give up your seat on the bus but then somebody else did but still you totally would have
  
• Arriving at brunch on time
  
• Offering
  everyone
  your gum even though that meant you went from a whole pack to no gum in a few seconds
  
• Writing that thank-you note
  
• Having only one drink and sipping water the rest of the evening
  
• Exercising
  
• Actually not telling the secret you promised not to tell, but not (as usual) because you forgot what the secret was
  
• Thinking nonjudgmental thoughts about that mother on the bus whose baby kept crying and crying and crying the whole way
  
• Being right on the Internet
  
• Going to your friend’s improv show
  
• Being a good loser
  
• Breaking up in person
  
• Taking out the trash
  
• Finishing Proust’s entire
  In Search of Lost Time
  
• Finishing Proust’s entire
  In Search of Lost Time
  and NOT bringing it up every chance you get, which shows real restraint
  
• Buying, cooking, and eating a vegetable
  
• Ordering salad
  
• Cleaning the bathroom
  
• Stepping on that cockroach for your roommates while they screamed and screamed
  
• Putting that spider under a glass and letting it out very carefully
  
• Filing your income taxes
  
• Fixing your parents’ computer
  
• Fixing your parents’ computer that other time
  
• Waking up early
  
• RSVP’ing
  
• Holding the door
  
• Not holding the revolving door
  
• Taking a taxi to the airport with that credit card your friend left in a bar so she was able to get on her plane and go to a job interview
  
• Cooking her that dinner
  
• Listening to your friend hem and haw and agonize and carry on about this guy she’s seeing who might be right but might also just be her idea of what’s right but how can you really know and what’s love anyway and is that the last beer do you mind if she has another beer?
  
• Doing the dishes
  
• Cleaning up after yourself
  
• Not crying
  
• Crying
  

They all came here and they are waiting for you. Let me know where to send them, and I will.

Being the world champion of something isn’t usually an instant social liability.

When Miss America arrives at your dinner table, you don’t sigh and throw up your hands and say, “Great! Now she’s going to smile and change into an evening gown, and our whole evening is ruined!” Actually, quite the opposite. When another guest confides that she is a member of the World Champion luge team, no one expects her to begin luging then and there. (Besides the simple fact that it would be rude, it would require a lot of specialized equipment that it is hard to carry with you to parties.)

Not so with punning.

Saying that you are a champion punster is like announcing that you are a world-class leper. “Oh,” everyone says, giving you a look as though you have just casually dropped an ear into the bean dip. “Well, congratulations,” they add, in a tone usually associated with the phrase “You should probably get that checked out.”

“Thank you,” you say.

“Well, do you want to make some puns for us, or what?” someone says, and everyone else glowers at him.

Punning is not a
skill
, their gimlet glances seem to say. Punning
is a
condition
. Punsters should be treated gently, with kid gloves, and you should give them that firm, polite, too-bright smile that these same people give when walking their children past cup-shakers on the sidewalk. “Don’t look away,” you can hear them murmuring, “but don’t stop, either. On no account stop.”

And as long as we’re being honest, these people may well have a point.

It’s a disease. We can’t help it.

Punning is a kind of Midas Touch. Everything you touch turns to puns, even if all you really want to do is eat a sandwich in peace and quiet:

“We would enjoy this sandwich, if you’d lettuce.”

“You mayo.”

“I’m not the one getting jalapeño face about it.”

“Give me some time to ketchup.”

“But I just mustard a lot of good puns!”

“Stop it! Just stop it!”

“Oh, ‘just top it!’ Good one!”

It’s like nuclear escalation. You can’t stop before the other guy does, or there’ll be fallout. (That wasn’t actually a pun, but it was close.)

Fran Lebowitz said that the opposite of talking isn’t listening—the opposite of talking is waiting. For punsters, the opposite of talking is waiting to make a pun.

Just recently, I was having a perfectly nice brunch when someone said, “I love lychee,” and with horror I heard myself saying, “I Love Lychee was my favorite 1950s sitcom.”

“Whyyyy?” everyone groaned, and I shrugged and shrank down in the chair and tried to explain that it wasn’t me; it was the condition.

It is the condition. It’s a sickness. It’s a disease.

My favorite quote about punning is from Stephen Leacock, who noted, “The inveterate punster follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.”

If so, this explains why sharks have so few chums.

(You see?)

Hearing nothing, understanding nothing, waiting only to make a meal of a carelessly dropped word, the punster follows, dogged and ineluctable in his pursuit, like Captain Ahab but leggier.

And now I’ve got the badge to prove it. Well, the trophy. Well, three trophies, if we’re staring at my rack.

I wasn’t born with it. It isn’t a thing you’re born with, like a silver spoon or a caul or synesthesia (I
wish
I had synesthesia! Right now, if I want to taste the rainbow, I have to buy a bag of Skittles) or a cool mutation that allows you to light things on fire with your thoughts. It’s learned.

I know when I learned it, too. My parents, worried that I might become popular at school, got me a book of puns at an impressionable age.

It worked like a charm. Puns were my anti-drug. They were my anti-social life. My social circle shrank to those who could tolerate long, rambling jokes that concluded with a triumphant “AND THAT’S WHY PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GRASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T STOW THRONES.” No chance of falling in with a bad crowd who would introduce me to Boys and Liquor and Jazz—but, hey, as the fern liked to say, with fronds like these, who needs anemones?

The book my parents gave me,
Pun and Games
by the eminent punster Richard Lederer, taught you how to take any conversation you were faced with and turn it into a pun. It was the wordplay equivalent of a manual on how to build bombs from common household materials. It came complete with sets of pun-problems for you to fill out with a pencil or pen.

There were lots of other wordplay games, too, like decoding vanity plates for various professions. NML 10DR was a zookeeper. 10SNE1 was a tennis pro. And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

I learned about inflationary language, whereby “wonderful” became “twoderful” and “I don’t know what you ate that for” becomes “I don’t know what you nine that five.” It didn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t me, but so what? That was the story of my life.

I learned about Spoonerisms. William Archibald Spooner was an Oxford don who gained fame by inadvertently swapping around the beginnings of his words. “Three cheers for our queer old dean!” he once toasted, raising a glass to Queen Victoria. “Mardon me, Padam, you are occupewing my pie,” he told a lady at church. “May I sew you to another sheet?” During World War I he commented, “When the boys come back from France, we’ll have the hags flung out.”

He wasn’t useful in average conversation, but he was great if I ever got into a situation where a cutting retort was called for. “You,” I would sneer, “are what William Archibald Spooner would have called a shining wit.”

No one ever seemed to notice how biting this was. Again, this was the story of my life.

By the time I had worked my way through all the exercises, learning along the way that “the man who hated seabirds left no tern unstoned, while the talented masseuse left no stern untoned,” I was unstoppable.

I hadn’t been a shark before, but now my eyes were opened. I saw pun potential everywhere. I began to follow conversations, sniffing for blood in the water. It was like one of those hideous transformations in a superhero movie. I walked into my room a normal person, was bitten on the ankle by a radioactive punster, and came staggering out a monster, spewing puns everywhere I turned.

With great power came great power to annoy.

And this state of things persisted.

•   •   •

When I got to college, everything changed. One of the first friends I made was someone who said, “Did you hear about the lady who shaved her legs and rectum?”

I nodded, feeling that sudden hot sensation that floods through your body when you experience true love or sit on something sharp.

“That’s my mom’s favorite pun,” she said.

And then I knew I was in the right place. We went on to be roommates and write several shows together, and after that she became a famous person whose Facebook updates I have to keep Liking. No, I’m kidding; we’re still friends. I think. (Call me?)

College was a parallel universe where punning was actually celebrated, in the form of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which I can best describe as a group for drinking, putting on an elaborate drag musical while drinking, and making puns while drinking. For a few halcyon years I breathed the rich, supersaturated air of people who could not see a word ending in “er” without tacking on “I hardly know ’er!” (To give you a sense of the level of wordplay involved, there was a show called “Acropolis Now” set in Ancient Greece, with a character named Hades Pantsaretight. I say “there was a show” like I didn’t cowrite it and take full responsibility for that pun.)

Then, gasping like a fish, I was decanted from college into the real world.

In real life there are few such safe spaces for puns. You cannot turn to someone during, say, an earthquake at your church and murmur, “Christ Church Parish? More like Christ Church Perish!” It just doesn’t get the reception you’d hope, like a disappointing wedding or [INSERT NAME OF YOUR CELL PROVIDER HERE!].

(You see what I’m talking about. It’s a disease.)

These days I work at a newspaper, where, in theory, there is plenty of room for puns. What are headlines, if not pun-Dumpsters? “WEINER HANGS OUT, EMBARRASSES CANDIDATE.”

But that was before the dark times. Before the Internet.

The Internet has given us punsters much—Twitter, for one—and I am grateful. But it has also paved over many of the pun’s time-honored stomping grounds. Newspaper headlines, which used to be safe spots where young puns could roam freely and graze at will, now have to be written to attract as much traffic as possible. A great headline pun, like “At Convention, Female Spiderman Spied Her Man” (okay, a passable pun) becomes “Six Unbelievable Tricks for Finding Love That Are Tangentially Related to Miley Cyrus in Some Way and Also Pornography! (Pornography)” or “This Article Made Me Cry for Six Reasons Beyoncé Beyoncé Beyoncé,” or no self-respecting search engine will ever point you toward it.

(For anyone reading this in the distant future, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé were two basically amiable carbon-based life-forms who were very good at making mouth-sounds and for some reason everyone felt the need to talk about them ALL THE TIME. (Those Earthling meatsacks, am I right??) Also, hi, future reader! What’s an advanced life-form like you doing with a book like this? If you are near humans, please don’t hunt them and convert their parts into scrap!)

Without the headline as a pun dumping ground, I had to console myself by hunting down the pun in literature and history and spreading the Good News, with the kind of nervous tenacity generally reserved for people who want to give religion to you or get drugs from you.

“Jesus used to make lots of puns,” I told people on the bus. “That was how you could tell he had tremendous personal magnetism. He
went up to Peter and said, ‘From now on, your name will be ‘Rock,’ because on this ‘Rock’ I build my church!’ And Peter actually followed him, instead of groaning and running away!”

“That’s nice.”

“You want miracles? That’s a miracle right there!”

“Oh look, here’s my stop,” my seat partners would say, getting off at a deserted reservoir several miles from any parked cars or people.

“Jesus also had a great one about how ‘you are fishermen now, but I will make you fishers OF men’ that you really have to hear in the original Greek to get the full flavor of!” I yelled cheerily as the doors closed.

Of course, people punned long before Jesus. Aristophanes was way into puns, doing clever and untranslatable things with “proktos” (butt) and “protos” (first). Cleopatra made a famous pun to cheer up her lover Mark Antony after their troops lost the town of Toryne to Emperor Augustus. Toryne means “ladle.” “What danger can there be from a ladle falling into his hands?” she asked. Ha-HA!

I look forward to cheering up a lover in a similar way. I know a lot of puns about disease, so I am well-fortified against any possible bad news. “Hip dysplasia?” I will say. “That must displease-ya!” “Yes we cancer!” “Acute appendicitis? I think it’s just okay-looking.” “Lou Gehrig’s Disease? Sorry, uh, that—you’re on your own there.”

And history had plenty more. “Not Angles, but Angels!” said Pope Gregory, seeing some Angles for the first time. “Oh no,” the Angles said. “Oh God. Leave.” (They also said this for unrelated reasons.)

Aside from spreading the Good News, I tried to work puns into my daily life, with mixed results. Even when things got serious, I couldn’t stop. “I see your father’s retiring,” a coworker told me.

“Well,” I said, “he’s always been pretty retiring.”

Groan.

Story of my life.

•   •   •

And then I discovered the O.Henry Pun-Off.

Every week, as part of my duties at the
Post
, I host a chat, which mostly consists of my talking to strangers about bacon and fending off the advances of one man with a Philly IP address who wants to know if I’ve gotten my “birthday spanking” yet. Noting my fondness for puns, they suggested that I try the Pun-Off, and in May of 2012, I did.

I had been traveling a fair bit that year—Iowa! South Carolina!—but I was instantly enchanted by Austin. I had never been to Texas before, and I thought that everything there was going to be cartoonishly large. I would get off the plane and all the road signs would be large enough to swat a mammoth with. All the mosquitoes would be the size of butterflies. Butterflies would be the size of hardcover books. There would be a big beltway comprised entirely of large Bibles. Everyone would have jangling spurs and go swaggering around leading giant blue oxen behind them.

But instead there was just a bit of traffic from the airport, a couple of clean-looking, well-lighted strip clubs, a giant park full of food trailers hung with fairy lights, and some buildings that resembled big crayons. If your idea of Heaven is anything like my idea of Heaven—which is to say, lots of weirdos, corn dogs, and cheap beer—Austin is the place for you.

The O.Henry Pun-Off was preceded by dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Opal Divine’s. I sat down at the table and instantly felt at home. On the table was a whole worksheet of Punny Names for Cocktails. It was just like
Pun and Games
all over again. “Your neckwear.” Mai Thai. “Citizen of the galaxy”? Cosmo-politan.

I was as prepared on the subject of puns as I was ill-equipped
when it came to O.Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter. All I had read of O.Henry was “The Gift of the Magi,” a short story about why you should never go out of your way to give somebody a thoughtful gift. “William Sydney Porter is buried in North Carolina,” said one of my dinner companions, a man with a mustache who resembled a worried moon.

“Great!” I said. “Is O.Henry buried nearby?”

He laughed as though I had made a hilarious joke, and I realized my mistake.

First came the tribute to the punster of the year, then everyone got up and told stories with pun punch lines, then the MC brought in a bin of objects and we all lined up to make puns on them. It was heaven.

“Being a punster can be hard,” one contestant confided. “Someone told me his wife had a stroke and I said, ‘That’s terrible! Three strokes, you’re out!’ and he didn’t think it was funny.”