Puny joke

The archaeologist whose career lies in ruins, the cannonball man offering his resignation only to be told ‘we were going to fire you anyway’ – why, as James Merrill opined, do puns invariably produce or provoke ‘groans of aversion’? Merrill seems to think that it has something to do with linguistic impropriety, analogous to and linked with sexual or social impropriety, so that the punner is made to feel mildly ashamed of his indiscretion. I'm not convinced. Is it that the primary meaning slips on the banana skin of the secondary meaning, thereby losing its dignity? Why the inbuilt bathos? And in fact, they only seem to have this 'groan'-effect when used as pun chlines; in other instances, they are part of the economy of wit ('earnest' in Wilde etc). Suggestions?

Comments

[Matt]

pun Chinsing, maybe? pun chalones?

pun clines, even or pun Chalons...

isn't some relation to inbuilt bathos inevitable? Then again, maybe there's an ideological-related reason Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Rushdie and the Hitchens get so high "indulging" in such "regrettably sophomoric" pastime. Likely on some level they think they're thrusting pins in the no doubt bloated PC empire, in such manner as possible objections are nought but further grist for the great laughing mills.

Unless you're Zizek of course, and so believe in the seriousness of puns (as far more than pun Chinsing), and whose mimicry forms a sort of ruthless parody of this tendency which then compounds when those targetted are structurally unable to 'get' it. There's an audio file of Zizek discussing all this somewhere, and his bemused frustration at those seemingly unable to 'get' his jokes...can't seem to find it though.

[Adam Kotsko]

Groaning and bathos -- that sounds right. This has got to be discussed somewhere in the phenomenological literature.

Thomas Pynchon discusses "the high magic of low puns" in The Crying of Lot 49. Appropriately enough, the other day I saw a bar called "Lot 48."