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Pun-tastic … Why the British Love Corny One-liners At the 2019 Edinburgh Festival the prize for ‘Dave’s Funniest Joke of The Fringe’ was awarded to a Swedish comedian known as Olaf Falafel, who triumphed with his quip: “I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’ – I think I might have florets.” Back in 2017, Chinese comedian Ken Cheng won the award for his gag: “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.” Turn back the clock even further to 2015 and the funniest joke award went to Darren Walsh for the simple but ingenious: “I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans-free.” Whether you love or loathe them, the jokes that have the biggest impact on British audiences are puns.
What is a pun?
A pun is a play on two or more words that sound the same (or almost the same) but have different meanings. In Britain we have a long and distinguished history of punning, with the first recorded use of the term dating back to 1643, but the practice of pun-making is even older than that. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle considered puns to be a kind of literary deception because they are open to different meanings. Although this kind of comic wordplay is undoubtedly popular, puns are often considered to be a low form of humour. We talk about ‘terrible’ puns and ‘bad jokes’, as if puns are a cheap laugh, easily understood by an audience. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth, as brain studies reveal it requires a degree of mental gymnastics to appreciate a pun.
Getting to the punchline
Humans organise their knowledge into memory structures known as schemas, so when we see, think or hear of something, the schema
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containing the relevant stored information is activated. When we hear Darren Walsh’s joke about deleting German names from his phone, our immediate response is to create a mental picture of a mobile phone with the help of our phone-related schema. But Darren is also talking about German names, so we call on another schema to remember how these names sound. It may take us a moment to process the difference between ‘Hans-free’ (a phone with no records of people with the name Hans) and ‘hands-free’ (a way of using a phone without having to hold it), but when we do, the surprising and unexpected juxtaposition between these two schemas makes us laugh.
Popular punsters
Some of our best known comedians have built their careers on delivering carefully crafted puns. Described as ‘The King of the One-liner’, Tim Vine’s jokes are legendary. Milton Jones is another high profile comedian who bases much of his comic material on puns. Speaking to The Scotsman newspaper in 2017, he claimed his successful style grew out of the “British tradition of nonsense.” So next time you hear a pun, don’t groan: consider the comic genius it took to think it up and appreciate the steps your brain goes through to enjoy it. You might also consider how much the humble pun has contributed to British culture, from William Chaucer to today’s celebrated stand-up comedians. By Kate McLelland
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