(Original Images)
A PAPER OF PUNS
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS
WHEN two major artists have chosen to turn aside from the practice of their art to discuss one of its principles, there may be an intrusive impropriety in a mere outsider’s rashly urging a reconsideration of any point they have felicitously sharpened. Yet it was only by impaling himself upon the acute weapons of his adversaries that Arnold von Winkelried was able to make way for liberty—an act of self-sacrifice which cost him his life and gained him immortality.
The art of punning has had few practitioners more accomplished than Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A century ago Lamb declared in a letter that “a pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. It is entire; it fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet,—better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of humor; it knows it should have an establishment of its own.” And in a more formal essay Elia discussed the popular fallacy that the worst puns are the best. Half a century ago the Autocrat in his turn expressed an adverse opinion of a form of wit in which he delighted and for which he was marvelously gifted. Lamb analyzed at length and with intense enjoyment the immortal query of the Oxford scholar meeting a porter carrying a hare and astounding him with the extraordinary question, “Is that your own hare or a wig?” And Holmes once pretended to have overheard a remark about “the Macaulay-flowers of literature”; and he recorded the conundrum, “Why is an onion like a piano?” declaring that it was incredible for any person in an educated community who could be found willing to answer it in these words, “Because it smell odious.”
The difference between Lamb and Holmes is that Elia is frank in declaring his delight in the ingenious dislocation of the vocabulary, whereas the Autocrat pretends to deprecate it, to depreciate it, and to disparage it as evidence in favor of the doctrine of the total depravity of man. He even invented a polysyllabic quotation from an earlier autocrat, the ponderous Doctor Johnson: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”