Must soon their vilest qualities eliminate.
“How fond he was of children! To his breast
The tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.
Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,
Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.
Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard pen
To write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
Lamb would have enjoyed the stanzas of this elegy, with the effortless ease of the long succession of puns, playing leap-frog; and Hood would have appreciated them without envy. Perhaps Lamb would have liked even better than Hood a superbly impossible pun in John Brougham’s burlesque of “Pocahontas,” a long popular piece, which perhaps owed a part of its success to the unhistoric marrying off of Captain John Smith and the dusky heroine. When Smith is bound to the sacrificial rock and the war-club of Powhatan is raised aloft to dash out the Englishman’s brains, Pocahontas rushes in with the plaintive cry, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon Smith lifts his head and asks, “Lemon or vanilla?” This has not a little of the illogical impossibility of “Is that your own hare or a wig?” and like that immortal query it defies analysis. It is not merely a play on a word; it is a play on an idea, which we cannot ourselves formulate.
Brougham was an Irishman who was a past-master in the art of punning. Perhaps his chief rival was the British playwright Henry J. Byron, who once wrote a burlesque on a theme from the “Arabian Nights” which he entitled “Ali Baba, or the Thirty-Nine Thieves—in accordance with the author’s habit of taking one off.” Byron, however, was wont to besprinkle the dialogue of his more ambitious comedies with puns not always fresh and not always appropriate. In one of his forgotten farces a retired soldier who had served in India makes a bore of himself by talking forever about the Bungalura River. Finally, one of the other characters, in a moment of natural irritation, ejaculates, “Oh, damn the Bungalura River!” To which the old officer responds instantly, “Sir, they have vainly endeavored to do so!” This is an ingenious quip in itself; but it was not at all in keeping with the character, since it was a remark the bore was quite incapable of making.
An earlier British dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, is said by his son and biographer never to have put a pun in the dialogue of any one of his plays; and if this assertion is well founded, the fact is the more curious since Jerrold was prolific of puns in conversation and in correspondence. In a letter written just after Queen Victoria had been fired at, Jerrold declared that he had seen her out driving, adding that “she looked very well, and—as is not always the case with women—none the worse for powder.” And it was at one of the “Punch” dinners that he made his cruellest retort, a pun with a venomous sting in the tail of it. Gilbert A Becket—author of a “Comic History of England” and a frequent contributor to “Punch” at the time when Jerrold was providing that weekly with “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures”—claimed a friendly interest from his associate, declaring, “You know we row in the same boat.” To which Jerrold retorted brutally, “Yes—but with different skulls.”