Yesterday I was reading more great comic strips published by L. J. Kopf — link at the bottom so y’all don’t leave me talking alone, people love to click but this is not TikTakTok.
I ended up leaving a comment and I liked what I wrote. This is an expanded version of the comment.
As I said, Kopf publishes his great comic strips with some comments. His cartoons are not always “just puns”, but yesterday… well, I read that yesterday… I mean, MY yester… never mind… “in the link provided below” his puns were intended. He started his text by saying:
My father liked the Marx Brothers (especially Groucho) so I didn’t think he really believed it when he would say punning was the lowest form of humor. (Kopf, mentioned above, then below)
No Pain, No Puns
I remembered those long years of painful English lessons — they made no pun of it at the time, it was strictly no pain no gain and only the strong survived. Joking in OPL’s (Other People’s Languages) is dead serious.
If you can’t make puns in your main language, it means you were born with an underdeveloped punis, a straight lobus jocularis or some unfortunate mal formation in your cortex festivus.
As far as I know from dealing with my mother, those are serious conditions and there’s no therapy for them.
If you can UNDERSTAND puns but are currently unable to make puns or, overall, tell jokes in OPL’s, that’s because you haven’t reached The Far Side in that language. Relax, you will get there. I mean, I hope you do, it’s really useful.
Do you, pre-pre-Millennials, remember the famous Hair song, "Let the Puns Shine"? It’s a testament to how important quip exchanges are in our culture. I’ll link to one video of the song below, it’s so great.
My Little China Pun
Hair and punchlines seem to be present in every culture. I checked with GPT — and then confirmed on “the real web" — that the Chinese love puns, though the PCC wants more regulations on those.
Would you like to hold a 小頸瓶 — Xiao jing ping? It means a “bottle with a small neck”, it seems. It’s phonetically close to Xi Jinping, or so my “sources” tried to explain to me.
If I got it totally wrong after checking in two different ways and using other sources and then retranslating, my deepest apologies. Anyone who might know better is very welcome to enlighten me on all this. I am fascinated by different cultures.
Homophones are a serious issue in China, so a tight punning is of great importance. As above, they have a political use as well — in Weibo, Chinese pundisters take advantage of the fact that thousands of Chinese characters are mapped to only 400 sounds, thus creating a lot of phonetic similarities, to escape censorship. They do that by typing a different sound-alike character that the digital censor won’t veto, but humans will read with the original meaning. But, yes, the CCP is going after that as well and, with AI, there will be little space left.
Google “Chinese puns” or something similar if you got curious about it. Like Spock, I found it fascinating.
Espertaralho para cadilho!
Puns are called trocadilhos in Portuguese. It translates literally to “small changes”, but the word trocadilho is specific for puns.
When somebody says a trocadilho that is so bad it hurts your ears, you might reply with irony, saying that the other person was espertaralho para cadinho.
That … sort of “formulaic phrase”… is a fancy elaboration on trocadilho esperto para caralho, literally a pun that was effing clever, meaning “boring”. It’s like saying “another Daddy joke” in English, in a different context.
Languages allow us to create incredible things.
Movers and Shackers
Puns are language specific and sophisticated, in fact. Never mind my mother’s missing cortex festivus, as she was otherwise a brilliant person.
After many years studying English — EIGHT years, and that was before I even got any good at discussions, simulating Mortal Kombat verbal fights in company meetings or writing for Medium!
I still remember the day when I made my first pun in English.
I was in a restaurant with an American friend, I needed salt, there was none on our table…
… and I said: "We’ve been assaulted"
She was quite impressed I could pull that out, and so was I. We didn’t end up together. Shame. But maybe the relationship wasn’t spicy enough.
Loose tongue
The thing that amazes me, being a linguist with a loose tongue, is how complex it gets in terms of semantics to pragmatics, while still minding the gap between reality and a specific language representation.
Contrary to any simplistic dictionary explanation, you are, in fact, using diverse mechanisms to shift representation to reality pairs. And you do that by freestyling with the language graph, in real time, considering a lot of possible shifts and structures and images and sounds.
Your limit is probably just…. Will others still get it?
Bass… how low can you go?
Mr. Kopf also mentioned is his studies the discovery of the "Bass bass" (again, check the link below!). My dear friend and scientific colaborator, Herr Dr. Van Helmanns, from the U. Of Tcschwotsklm, in Eastern Sweden, affirms that each specific pun can only exist in its own language.
No bass bass with Sauerkraut, unless cats in Germany roll by the same drum, but it might fit in a Swedish Köttbullar, specially if you call it Basbullar. (Bass is bas in Swedish and I think you might actually get the “Bas bas” pun going there.)
If you want to consider how really hard it is to make a pun, consider explaining what/how/what to another person. I find it difficult to explain what a “pun” is without sticking to the simple dictionary schtick that says it’s just a shift in sounds that changes meanings.
Final one — what about using puns to teach and test language skills?
Puns and any other clever & creative use of language, such as poetry, fiction, humor, are great tools for learning.
I still remember watching “Good Morning, Vietnam” in the US, obviously without legends, and not understanding half of what Robin Williams said, and then not understanding the jokes he made. I also remember Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” as being hard at times, and I only understood what Terry Jones was saying in a female voice with a couple of accents of top when I finally got the legends. There were many other movies and songs and they all helped me better understand Real English.
Why don’t we do those interesting things more often in education?
Instead of standardized language tests that are boring and take forever and are utter non-sense, specially the newest ones, pundits should just give students a few topics and ask them to write some puns.
For now, language courses are still pretty much like …
Now, if you’ll forgive me, I had too much fun writing this, I had to generate all the images that are also a lot of fun to me to come up with and rework until I get it right etc … so I’ll just publish it!
- L. J. Kopf — thanks for “bass bass” & many other cartoons. They make me smile when things are weird all around me. I’m seriously thankful for people with humour.
Link to the pre-Lion King pre-Hamilton Broadway Musical “HAIR”, except it’s the movie here — Hair Let the Sunshine In — YouTube
