Headpiece for Paper of PunsA PAPER OF PUNS
Headpiece for Paper of Puns
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS
WHEN two major artists have chosen to turn aside from the practice of their art to discuss one of its principles, there may be an intrusive impropriety in a mere outsider’s rashly urging a reconsideration of any point they have felicitously sharpened. Yet it was only by impaling himself upon the acute weapons of his adversaries that Arnold von Winkelried was able to make way for liberty—an act of self-sacrifice which cost him his life and gained him immortality.
The art of punning has had few practitioners more accomplished than Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A century ago Lamb declared in a letter that “a pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. It is entire; it fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet,—better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of humor; it knows it should have an establishment of its own.” And in a more formal essay Elia discussed the popular fallacy that the worst puns are the best. Half a century ago the Autocrat in his turn expressed an adverse opinion of a form of wit in which he delighted and for which he was marvelously gifted. Lamb analyzed at length and with intense enjoyment the immortal query of the Oxford scholar meeting a porter carrying a hare and astounding him with the extraordinary question, “Is that your own hare or a wig?” And Holmes once pretended to have overheard a remark about “the Macaulay-flowers of literature”; and he recorded the conundrum, “Why is an onion like a piano?” declaring that itwas incredible for any person in an educated community who could be found willing to answer it in these words, “Because it smell odious.”
The difference between Lamb and Holmes is that Elia is frank in declaring his delight in the ingenious dislocation of the vocabulary, whereas the Autocrat pretends to deprecate it, to depreciate it, and to disparage it as evidence in favor of the doctrine of the total depravity of man. He even invented a polysyllabic quotation from an earlier autocrat, the ponderous Doctor Johnson: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”
This is an appalling overstatement of the case; and Holmes was happier in another of the remarks made in the same chapter of the book in which he expressed the utmost of his own witty wisdom: “People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight-train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” Here the doctor is on solid ground; a pun may be a good thing in itself, as good as a sonnet even, but it is only dirt—that is to say, matter in the wrong place—when it is injected into good talk only to throw the conversational locomotive off the track. Oddly enough, the Autocrat was once himself derailed by a pun a score of years after he had thus laid down the law; and, as it happens, I had the full particulars of the fatal accident from the punster who placed the penny on the track. In this case the disturber of traffic was the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
When Matthew Arnold paid his first visit to America thirty years ago, Aldrich gave him a dinner and invited the best that Boston and Cambridge had to show to do honor to his alien guest. He put Arnold on his right and Holmes on his left; and early in the dinner he discovered that the Autocrat was in fine form and ready to discourse in his best manner. Holmes began by suggesting that it must be amusing to meet unexpected characters, burglars, for example, and pirates, and cannibals. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were to meet a cannibal walking down Beacon Street?” And he paused for the reply that he did not desire, whereupon Aldrich saw his chance and responded promptly, “I think I should stop to pick an acquaintance.” The rest of the company laughed at this sally, but Holmes looked at his host reproachfully and then shut up absolutely, saying scarcely a word during the rest of the dinner. The witticism, even if it was bright and not battered, had upset the freight-train of the Autocrat’s conversation. And as Aldrich asserted, in telling the sad story, the host had to repent in a sack-coat and cigarette-ashes for the rest of his life. Autocrats are autocrats, after all; and not with impunity are their unlimited expresses to be flagged by an unauthorized pun.
Possibly it was the painful memory of this unfortunate experience which led Dr. Holmes to omit from the final edition of his complete works the very amusing account of his “Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters,” which he had included in an earlier volume—“Soundings from the ‘Atlantic’”—now out of print. He tells us in this paper that he was surprised to find that the asylum was intended wholly for males; and yet on reflection he admitted the remarkable psychologic fact that “there is no such a thing as a female punster. At least,” he adds, “I never knew or heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman make a single detached pun, as I have known a hen to crow.” And when we recall the proverbial fate of the crowing hen, the fair sex may rejoice that there are no female punsters, whatever may be the psychological explanation of the remarkable fact itself. The fact might indeed be accounted for easily by those ungallant cynics who maintain that women are careless in the employment of words (which are the raw material of puns), commonly using them as counters to convey emotions rather than as coins to express thoughts.
Holmes’s account of his visit to the asylum reverberates with the rattle of a corps of conundrummers; and every one of the inmates is ready with his contribution, from the superintendent who explained why “they did not take steppes in Tartary for establishing insane hospitals, because there are nomad people to be found there,” to the retired sailor who had gone as mate on a fishing-schooner, giving it up because he “did not like working for two-masters.” The most imaginative touch is at the end of the paper when the visitors are introduced to a centenarian inmate, who asks affably, “Why is a—a—a like a—a—a? Give it up? Because it is a—a—a.” Then he smiled pleasantly; and the superintendent explained that the ancient man was “one hundred and seven last Christmas. He lost his answers about the age of ninety-eight. Of late years he puts his whole conundrums in blank—but they please him just as well.”
Lowell, who was Holmes’s chief rival among the Cambridge wits, did not pretend to disdain the pun, as Holmes affected to do. But he insisted upon the absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Lowell pointed out that Hood, who is said to have lain on his death-bed “spitting blood and puns,” abounded in examples of this sort of fun, “only his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind.” To illustrate this assertion Lowell quoted Hood’s elegy on the old sailor, whose
“... head was turned, and so he chewedHis pigtail till he died.”
“... head was turned, and so he chewedHis pigtail till he died.”
“... head was turned, and so he chewedHis pigtail till he died.”
“... head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.”
And the American critic called this “inimitable, like all the best of Hood’s puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non-sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in theand so.”
Another quotation from Hood also won high commendation from Lowell. It was taken from the peddler’s recommendation of his ear-trumpet:
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,Like some in the advertising line,To magnify sounds on such marvelous scalesThat the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.There was Mrs. F.So very deafThat she might have worn a percussion-capAnd been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next dayShe heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,Like some in the advertising line,To magnify sounds on such marvelous scalesThat the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.There was Mrs. F.So very deafThat she might have worn a percussion-capAnd been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next dayShe heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,Like some in the advertising line,To magnify sounds on such marvelous scalesThat the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,
Like some in the advertising line,
To magnify sounds on such marvelous scales
That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.
There was Mrs. F.So very deafThat she might have worn a percussion-capAnd been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next dayShe heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
There was Mrs. F.
So very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion-cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
Is that last line wit or humor? It is a play on a word, no doubt, and that would relate it to wit. But it has the imaginative exaggeration that we are wont to associate with humor. Lowell noted that we find it natural to speak of the breadth of humor, while wit, by the necessity of its being, is “as narrow as a flash of lightning, and as sudden.” Humor has also its unexpectedness, and while most good puns must be classed as specimens of wit, some few transcendent examples may fairly claim to be specimens of humor—that last line of Hood’s, for example. Many other instances might be advanced. A very distinguished British scientist had the foible of inventing thrilling episodes in his own autobiography; and on one occasion after he had spun a most marvelous yarn, with himself in the center of the coil, a skeptical friend looked him in the eye and asked sternly, “Clifford, do you mean to say that this really occurred to you?” Whereupon the imaginative man of science laughed lightly and with a most imperturable assurance calmly answered, “Yes—it just occurred to me!”
It is wit and not humor, no doubt, when Holmes promulgates the law of financial safety: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” It is wisdom as well as wit, but is it a pun? Is it only a play on words? Is it not also a play on the idea? And take the somewhat parallel remark about the rising fortune of a successful man, to the effect that “he got on, he got honor, he got honest.” That again is wit; but is it fairly to be termed a pun? Merely verbal playfulness is more obvious in a recent remark that “some men stand for office, some men run for it, and some have a walk-over,” and yet that somehow fails to fall completely within any acceptable definition of the pun. If it is a pun, it is something more also. With these specimens may be grouped three other remarks which have not hitherto been recorded in print. When a certain critic of limited equipment was appointed to the chair of comparative literature in one of our universities, the question was asked why he was assigned to this particular professorship, since his information was mainly confined to English; and the explanation was instantly forthcoming that comparative literature was the position for which he was best fitted, because his own literature was neither positive nor superlative. A certain former Vice-President of the United States has been described as “a very cold-blooded proposition,” and yet his speeches were the usual flowery and perfervid political oratory which led an observer to make the assertion that “to hear —— speak is like catching nature in the act of self-contradiction, since it is the emission of hot air from an ice-box.”
And it was the same anonymous observer who pointed out the difference between two contemporary British authors, insisting that “Mr. George Bernard Shaw always writes with his tongue in his cheek, whereas when Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is writing he keeps thrusting his tongue out at the public.” Now, are these remarks, strictly speaking, puns? They conform at least to one of Lamb’s definitions that a pun “is a pistol let off at the end, not a feather to tickle the intellect,” and that it is “not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.” He warns us that “a pun may be easily too curious and artificial”; and he held that a pun, at least in actual conversation, ought to stand alone and not be followed by another. “When a man has said a good thing it is seldom politic to follow it up.” This is true enough of conversation; but it does not apply to literature. The spoken word and the written have different rules. A large part of the humorous effect of the trumpet-peddler’s eulogy of the wares he is vending is due to the heaping-up of the puns, one tumbling over another, like salmon flashing swiftly in the sunshine as they follow each other up the falls. Here our pleasure is akin to that we take at the circus as we behold the acrobats going on from one impossible stunt to its equally impossible successor and accomplishing these feats as if each was the easiest thing in the world.
There is in many passages of that rollicking satire, “A Fable for Critics,” wise as it is in its author’s acute valuation of his contemporaries, a riot of complicated riming and of unexpected punning,—passages which impress us with an abiding sense of spontaneous humor and good humor. These passages overflow with fun, and we are carried along by Lowell’s delight in displaying his verbal dexterity. For once he appears before us dancing on a metrical tight-rope and setting off iridescent fireworks at the ends of his balancing-pole. Consider, for example, these lines at the very beginning, where Apollo is discussing his plight after he had pursued Daphne and she had turned into a tree:
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarkedIn a laurel, asshethought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)She has found it by this time a very bad box;Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it—You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!What romance would be left?—who can flatter or kiss trees?And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogueWith a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—Not to say that the thought would forever intrudeThat you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,As they left me forever, each making its bough!If her tonguehada tang sometimes more than was right,Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarkedIn a laurel, asshethought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)She has found it by this time a very bad box;Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it—You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!What romance would be left?—who can flatter or kiss trees?And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogueWith a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—Not to say that the thought would forever intrudeThat you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,As they left me forever, each making its bough!If her tonguehada tang sometimes more than was right,Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarkedIn a laurel, asshethought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)She has found it by this time a very bad box;Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it—You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!What romance would be left?—who can flatter or kiss trees?And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogueWith a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—Not to say that the thought would forever intrudeThat you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,As they left me forever, each making its bough!If her tonguehada tang sometimes more than was right,Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;
‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, asshethought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it—
You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!
What romance would be left?—who can flatter or kiss trees?
And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough!
If her tonguehada tang sometimes more than was right,
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
Almost worthy to be set beside Lowell’s lines is Mr. William A. Croffut’s “Dirge concerning the late lamented King of the Cannibal Islands” in which he rings the changes on a single theme:
“And missionaries graced his festive board,Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,And smoked before their hospitable lord,Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.When cold he warmed them as he would his kin—They came as strangers, and he took them in.“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasantThey found it quite judicious to adore him;And when he dined, the nymphs were always present—Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;Good food exalts us like an inspiration,And missionaries on themenublessesAnd elevates the Feejee population.A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ateMust soon their vilest qualities eliminate.“How fond he was of children! To his breastThe tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard penTo write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
“And missionaries graced his festive board,Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,And smoked before their hospitable lord,Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.When cold he warmed them as he would his kin—They came as strangers, and he took them in.“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasantThey found it quite judicious to adore him;And when he dined, the nymphs were always present—Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;Good food exalts us like an inspiration,And missionaries on themenublessesAnd elevates the Feejee population.A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ateMust soon their vilest qualities eliminate.“How fond he was of children! To his breastThe tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard penTo write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
“And missionaries graced his festive board,Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,And smoked before their hospitable lord,Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.When cold he warmed them as he would his kin—They came as strangers, and he took them in.
“And missionaries graced his festive board,
Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,
And smoked before their hospitable lord,
Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.
When cold he warmed them as he would his kin—
They came as strangers, and he took them in.
“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasantThey found it quite judicious to adore him;And when he dined, the nymphs were always present—Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’
“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasant
They found it quite judicious to adore him;
And when he dined, the nymphs were always present—
Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.
When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’
And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’
“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;Good food exalts us like an inspiration,And missionaries on themenublessesAnd elevates the Feejee population.A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ateMust soon their vilest qualities eliminate.
“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;
Good food exalts us like an inspiration,
And missionaries on themenublesses
And elevates the Feejee population.
A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ate
Must soon their vilest qualities eliminate.
“How fond he was of children! To his breastThe tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard penTo write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
“How fond he was of children! To his breast
The tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.
Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,
Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.
Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard pen
To write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
Lamb would have enjoyed the stanzas of this elegy, with the effortless ease of the long succession of puns, playing leap-frog; and Hood would have appreciated them without envy. Perhaps Lamb would have liked even better than Hood a superbly impossible pun in John Brougham’s burlesque of “Pocahontas,” a long popular piece, which perhaps owed a part of its success to the unhistoric marrying off of Captain John Smith and the dusky heroine. When Smith is bound to the sacrificial rock and the war-club of Powhatan is raised aloft to dash out the Englishman’s brains, Pocahontas rushes in with the plaintive cry, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon Smith lifts his head and asks, “Lemon or vanilla?” This has not a little of the illogical impossibility of “Is that your own hare or a wig?” and like that immortal query it defies analysis. It is not merely a play on a word; it is a play on an idea, which we cannot ourselves formulate.
Brougham was an Irishman who was a past-master in the art of punning. Perhaps his chief rival was the British playwright Henry J. Byron, who once wrote a burlesque on a theme from the “Arabian Nights” which he entitled “Ali Baba, or the Thirty-Nine Thieves—in accordance with the author’s habit of taking one off.” Byron, however, was wont to besprinkle the dialogue of his more ambitious comedies with puns not always fresh and not always appropriate. In one of his forgotten farces a retired soldier who had served in India makes a bore of himself by talking forever about the Bungalura River. Finally, one of the other characters, in a moment of natural irritation, ejaculates, “Oh, damn the Bungalura River!” To which the old officer responds instantly, “Sir, they have vainly endeavored to do so!” This is an ingenious quip in itself; but it was not at all in keeping with the character, since it was a remark the bore was quite incapable of making.
An earlier British dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, is said by his son and biographer never to have put a pun in the dialogue of any one of his plays; and if this assertion is well founded, the fact is the more curious since Jerrold was prolific of puns in conversation and in correspondence. In a letter written just after Queen Victoria had been fired at, Jerrold declared that he had seen her out driving, adding that “she looked very well, and—as is not always the case with women—none the worse for powder.” And it was at one of the “Punch” dinners that he made his cruellest retort, a pun with a venomous sting in the tail of it. Gilbert A Becket—author of a “Comic History of England” and a frequent contributor to “Punch” at the time when Jerrold was providing that weekly with “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures”—claimed a friendly interest from his associate, declaring, “You know we row in the same boat.” To which Jerroldretorted brutally, “Yes—but with different skulls.”
One of the pleasantest of the protean appearances of the pun is to be found in the familiar quotation, made unexpectedly pertinent by a felicitous suggestion of an unforeseen meaning hitherto concealed in one of its words. A neat example of this is the Shaksperian motto which the late Edwin Booth caused to be inscribed on the mantelpiece of the grill-room in the club he founded for the practitioners of the allied arts: “Mouth it, as many of our Players do.” When Mrs. Stowe was on her way to Liverpool a fog suddenly shut the ship in after it had taken on the pilot; and the authoress suggested that the pilot might sing, “That Mersey I to others show, that Mersey show to me.” And in the “Autocrat” again Dr. Holmes, after dwelling on the delight he had in beholding noble oaks and spreading elms, mentioned one tree which was more than eighteen feet in girth, and expressed a hope that he might meet a tree-loving friend under its branches. “If we don’t have youth at the prow, we shall have pleasure at the ’elm.” This is added evidence, were any needed, that Holmes was not sincere in his denunciation of punning, or at least that he was willing to damn “the sins he had no mind to.”
The derogatory old saying that a pun is the lowest form of wit has been explained by the apt addition that this is because a pun is the foundation of all wit. This explanation is not strictly true, of course; the best wit is often independent of any flavor of word-play. But there is a kind of pun which is really lower than any other effort to arouse laughter; this is the pun which is due to a violent wrench made visible only by the use of italics. As a general principle we may assert that any pun is beneath contempt when it needs a typographic sign-post before it can be seen. And the unfortunate who descends to this dismal form of near-wit is of a truth the “mournful professor of high drollery” that George Eliot once castigated. Pitiable specimens of his lamentable handiwork—if anything so mechanical may fairly be described by this term—can be discovered abundantly in more than one of the inferior comic weeklies of Great Britain; and even the superior weekly “Punch” is not always free from it.
When an observer of international characteristics shall undertake the task of differentiating the British from the Americans he can scarcely fail to note that the mechanical pun, the bare play upon the sound of a word without any corresponding diversity of idea, is far commoner in the older branch of the English-speaking race than it is in the younger. This strikes us at once when we compare the comic papers or the comic operas of Great Britain with those of the United States. The transatlantic relish for purely verbal juggling is probably an inheritance from the Elizabethans, for we find it displayed in even the mightiest of them, Shakspere. Curious it is, therefore, that we colonists did not import it in the original package as we imported so many other Tudor characteristics, some of which are still discoverable on this side of the Western ocean although on the other they have fallen into “innocuous desuetude.”