I'm such a "pun"k

My favorite college professor, David Lee, talked about puns with affection. I remember he told his Milton class that Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia listed the pun as the lowest form of humor. As far as we English scholars were concerned that (and the fact that Funk and Wagnalls Volumes A-J were available for 10 cents to a $1.88 at the local grocery store) discredited them entirely in our eyes.

If you tend to be in the Funk and Wagnalls camp, consider this, the brillance of Shakespeare was largely his use of the pun as a literary device. For instance, the character Mercutio, from Romeo and Juliet, jokester until the end. Who didn't love the moment when on his death bed he states, "tomorrow you shall find me a grave man."

So, why puns? I woke up this morning to find this amazing article on the "Peterman's Eye" blog. Please read. There's nothing so great as waking up to something that makes you laugh tremendously hanging out in your e-mail inbox on a Friday morning. I can tell this will be a great day unequalled in jocularity.

I consider myself quite the punster on occassion- some deliberate, some accidental. Here are some highlights from my life.

My husband and I have a running joke. Occassionally, he will come into the kitchen and commences the following dialogue,
Brett: Hun, You know what I'm craving?
Me: No, What would you like?
Brett: I could really go for a nice tall Metamucil right now.

Once my sister, Miriam was visiting and witnessed the nature of our discourse.
Brett: (to Miriam) I like to think of Metamucil as a delicious orange smoothy.
Me: Only I prefer to call it an orange roughy.

Here's another great one. As I have stated in previous entries, I babysit for a living. One day my daughter, Katie, rather suddenly and inexplicably hit, Allan, one of or daily "guests" over the head with a battery. Thankfully his mother, Sarah, is a dear friend of mine.
Me: I'm sorry about the bruise on Allan's forehead. Katie, for some reason, decided to hit him with a battery of all things.
Sarah: Was it a little one like a double A or did she go in for a big one? Like a D?
Me: Oh no, she went in for a big one. She got him with a D. You might say she committed assault and battery.

Finally, and I swear this was an accident, back when I was teaching Junior English, I made my class read, Arthur Miller's, The Crucible. In The Crucible, Miller inerrupts the action of the play a few times with running editorials. In one of these, he makes the point that the puritanical rejection of sexuality and diabolism only serves to those "forbidden" topics even more curious and interesting. I was trying to figure out how to present this idea tactfully to a room full of 16 year olds.

Me: So you see, even in the time of the Puritans people were still interested in topics of sexuality even though they were forbidden. (I'm feeling like this is going pretty well so I start getting into it.) You know, sex sells! Just like in our modern world. (I should have stopped there!) I mean, look at television commercials and the images of sexulaity advertisers use. (Nope, I'm still talking- fool that I am) You know, if you show it, they will come. (Oh, dear!)

OK, so I'm no Shakespeare.