Alexander Pope, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, William Shakespeare, John Donne and Lewis Carroll. All brilliant writers, surely no one would argue the fact. They have more than just being great writers in common. All of them also had a fondness for puns.
Samuel Johnson disparagingly referred to punning as "the lowest form of humour", and that remark has been diligently repeated down through the years. If you've ever told someone a pun, you've surely had it said to you. I know I have, for I am very fond of puns. Well, all forms of humor, really, but ever since childhood there's been a special place in my catalogue of humor for puns. Why Samuel Johnson considered them the lowest form of humor I do not know, but if it was because he considered them simplistic, then I would have to say he really didn't know that much about them.
So what exactly is a pun? Henri Bergson, a French philosopher influential in the first half of the 20th century defined a pun as a sentence or utterance in which "two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are confronted with only one series of words". Expressed that way, I fail to see how it could be the lowest form of humor. It actually takes careful thought to come up with an original pun, but I will concede that it doesn't seem so upon hearing them most of the time.
In fact, there are different varieties of puns, some simple, and some complex. Puns are of two basic types, homophonic and homographic. A homophonic pun exploits word pairs that sound exactly alike (perfect homophones), but are not synonymous. For example, the statement "Atheism is a non-prophet institution" substitutes the word "prophet" for its homophone "profit" in the common phrase "non-profit institution".
A homographic pun exploits different words, which are spelled the same way, but possess different meanings. For example, the statement "Being in politics is just like playing golf; you are trapped in one bad lie after another" puns on the two meanings of the word lie as "a deliberate untruth" and as "the position in which something rests".
More rarely one comes across puns that are a combination of homographic and homophonic. An example is Douglas Adams's line "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass." The phrase exploits the homophonic qualities of "tune a" and "tuna", as well as the homographic pun on "bass", in which ambiguity is reached through the identical spelling of /beɪs/ (low frequency), and /bæs/ (a kind of fish).
Within the two basic types there are compound puns, a sentence that contains two or more puns, recursive puns, a sentence that contains a pun that refers to the similar sounding word: for example the statement "pi is only half a pie." (Half a circle is 180 degrees or pi radians, and a pie is circular), and extended pun or pun sequence, which is a long utterance that contains multiple puns with a common theme.
That last type includes my all time favorite pun, which I will close with. I know Easter is past now, but this an Easter knock-knock joke, and knock-knock jokes are a type of pun. So, here it is, my five-part Easter knock-knock pun:
Knock-Knock
Who's there?
Ether.
Ether who?
Ether bunny!
Knock-Knock
Who's there?
Nutter
Nutter who?
Nutter ether bunny!
Knock-Knock
Who's there?
Stella
Stella who?
Stella nutter ether bunny!
Knock-Knock
Who's there?
Cargo
Cargo who?
Cargo beep-beep and run over all the ether bunnies!
Knock-Knock
Who's there?
Boo
Boo who?
Don't cry, the ether bunnies will be back next year!
