Puns

General Distinctions

Puns are not simpler in principle than other instances of humorous stimuli, they are merely very condensed. In puns, the textual items that carry the mechanisms that make a text potentially humorous are relatively few: often just one punning word, a similar or identical target word (which may or may not be present), and two meanings that are spuriously appropriate in light of the joke’s setup. Consider the following pun:

In this example, the punch line “Dam(n)” is appropriate in two of its meanings: a structure walling in water in which fish swim can be a dam, and, given its painful accident, a fish might exclaim “damn” (never mind that fish don't swear, or speak at all, because for the sake of jokes such inconsistencies are ignored). This pun is phonetically “perfect,” in that both meanings share the exact same sounds, but they can be distinguished by the presence or absence of the final n as a spelling difference. In other words, this pun is homophonic (identically sounding) but not homographic (identically written), which is one of the various classifications of puns found in the literature. Most of the classifications are based on superficial differences that are easily identified by the methods of various disciplines, but they don't reflect fundamentally different mechanisms of puns.

Cicero is one of the earliest persons to distinguish puns from other types of jokes. He saw puns as being not just about the meaning, or the concepts [Page 613]the words stand for, but also about the words themselves, their manifestation in sounds or the letters that represent those sounds. As with all symbols, the physical manifestations of words are related to an underlying meaning. This relationship is, in principle, arbitrary, with no logical, inherent, natural reason to assign a certain sound sequence to a certain meaning. This arbitrariness can be illustrated by the fact that different languages have chosen completely different sound sequences for the same meanings. Notable exceptions are onomatopoeic words that refer to objects or events that are associated with a certain sound. These words often imitate the sound emitted by the object or occurring in the event, such as animal calls (“meow”), or the sound of one object being emitted from another object (“bang”). In onomatopoeia there is a (partially) motivated relation between the sound of a word and the meaning of the word, which is imitated by the sound of the word.

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