forgive the most awful pun in the title, had to make it as cheesy as possible, because I am about to take all of the fun out of puns for you by explaining a few I made to my friends this weekend, and we all know that the fun is lost when you have to explain the pun.
I started off my weekend by thinking about Dr. Sexon's pun "the pun is mightier than the sword" and I decided I would reconfigure it a little to say "The pun is mightier than these words." I will now explain this little manipulation to the fullest, thereby sucking all the joy from it. as one can see, the original statement is still there in "The pun is mightier than these words." but it is clearly "translated." What I have done here is as such: in punning off of the original phrase, which is "the pen is mightier than the sword" I have brought to the readers mind the power of language. Simple enough obviously. Now let's look at the more refined part. This is in itself a pun is it not? so how then can the pun be mightier than these words? These words are a pun. The implication I'm making here is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Then all we have to do is put those two things together, and we've got the meaning of the pun. Language is most powerful when the work produced is greater than the sum of its rhetorical devices. Any hack can throw allusions and puns and metaphors into a piece, but what is special is when these things serve a purpose that cannot be dissected with the rhetoric, but rather works on a sort of subconscious level. It has to explain itself, but most indirectly.
Next joke I made I was very happy about, because it involved making fun of one of my friends, and I did so by manipulating her into saying more or less what I wanted to say just so I could make a joke. How did I do this you ask? We were having a conversation, and she, being the stereotypical bio-major, was complaining about all of her homework. I told her, "I think you should just become an English major so that you can stop complaining about homework all the time." She was quick to tell me that that was a "dumb" idea. I then told her that "Science is dumb" knowing full well that she would say "you're dumb" or something to that effect. Even better. She said "You're dumb for saying science is dumb." Oh man, excited. my response was as such: "No, dear Erin, that is a contradiction in itself. If I were dumb I could not have said anything for, dumb meaning mute, and mute meaning unable to speak, Simply by saying 'science is dumb' I have disproved you. Moreover, by the same logic, I say that science is dumb because, unlike English, it just doesn't speak to me." Yes, this is a two layer joke. English speaks because it is a language, and because I like it. Science, conversely does not speak to me, quite obviously, because I don't like it as well. Or at least that is the joke, though I do have a rather strong appreciation for science.
On to word play number 3, which came about just today. It just so happens that I love to think about the "positive" actions of negatives, such as the effects silence on a conversation, or how vacuums suck, despite the fact that a vacuum is in itself not a thing, but a lack of anything essentially. Things like this are quite entertaining to me, so Shakespeare and Fred Turner discussing the fact that "Nothing matters" with such attention to it's "positive" applications really struck a chord with me. I was thinking about why Bottom calls his dream "Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom." and I reasoned it out thus: do your dreams have you, or do you have your dreams? You have your dreams, not the other way around; therefore, Bottom's dream hath no Bottom because Bottom hath it. Truly, Bottom is not in his own "dream" because instead of Bottom, there is an ass (gotta love those synonyms). Then I started thinking about bottomless things (bottomless being the nothing I was discussing earlier), and my friends again pulled through for me, one saying "my professor's knowledge about [something that I've already forgotten regarding anthropology] is seriously bottomless." and then I said, being the ass that I am, "we are all bottomless with regards to knowledge. The only difference between us is that some of us are bottomless wells, and others bottomless vessels. Some of us have infinite storage space, and others can't retain a thing." I was pretty proud of that one for being as on the spot as it was.
And that about sums up my exciting weekend.
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