By the way, anybody who wants to tell me how beautiful snow is might want to come by and shovel my driveway. Grrr...
I know a man/
his name is Lang/
and he has a neon sign/
and Mr. Lang is very old/
so they call it "Old Lang's Sign."
--Allan Sherman
There are people who believe puns are the lowest form of humor. They're wrong. The fact is, there is no "lowest form of humor." There are just people who don't know how to use the forms we have. Generally speaking, they try to amuse with mean-spirited jokes, shock jokes, and movies with both Ben Stiller and Robert DeNiro.
When Groucho Marx told his brother Chico (pronounced CHICK-o) that the boilerplate at the bottom of a contract was "the sanity clause" and Chico knowingly responded, "You can't fool me, mister. There ain't no Sanity Clause," that was a pun. In Young Frankenstein, when Gene Wilder helped Teri Garr out of the cart in front of the doors with
the enormous metal hoops used for alerting those inside that someone was out the door and he said, "What knockers!" Teri responded, "Oh, thank you, Doctor." That was a visual pun.
If you want to live in a world that doesn't have those kinds of jokes, feel free, but leave me to my lowest form, please. I'll live here without having to endure another slacker/stoner comedy where all the jokes are about sex or drugs, but without puns, because puns are the lowest form of humor.
When Tom Lehrer insisted that gargling was invented by a tribe in the Andes "who passed the secret down from father to son as part of their oral tradition," it was a pun. When Shakespeare's Richard III spoke of "the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York," it was a pun.
Shakespeare used puns all the time. So did Oscar Wilde. George Bernard Shaw. Other classy British men, like John Cleese (whose family name was originally "Cheese").
Lowest form of humor? Sure, if the people making the jokes are bad at it. When done properly, puns are uplifting and hilarious. It's the mistake people often make--if something elicits a groan rather than a laugh, it's a bad joke. Are puns the only kind of jokes that elicit groans? Hardly.
The Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons and other products of Jay Ward's twisted imagination were rife with puns, including a Fractured Fairly Tale that actually ended happily with the nuptials of a gride (a medieval word for "dustpan") and a broom. A gride and a broom. Get it?
I'm singing you the ballad/
of a great man of the cloth/
His name was Harry Lewis/
and he worked for Irving Roth/...
Oh, Harry Lewis perished/
in the service of his lord'
He was trampling through the warehouse/
where the drapes of Roth are stored.
--Allan Sherman
I hope everybody who reads or has stumbled across DEAD GUY has a wonderful new year. And if you happen to pass Old Lang's Sign, raise a cup to the old guy for me, won't you?
We at HEY THERE'S A DEAD GUY IN THE LIVING ROOM are miserably sorry to see our brilliant Tuesday blogger Barbara Poelle move on, and deliriously happy to be welcoming Michelle Brower, our new brilliant Tuesday blogger. Barbara, you always managed to be hilarious and informative at the same time. And one of these days, I'm going to get you for that. Our very best wishes. Michelle, welcome aboard! We can't wait to see what you have to say!
