Why I Don’t Like Puns: Response to Haryette Mullen’s Recylcopedia

When I think of puns I immediately think of a socially inept individual who knows no other way to break the ice during an event with strangers other than to suddenly exclaim, “You know what the worst part about these functions are?”

I sip my watered down free whiskey sour provided by the gracious patrons of the event, mumbling, “Mm.”

This said someone, awkward and sweating, sort of chuckles to himself, obviously struggling to get to the punch line because it’s just so damn funny, and states, “You get that feeling of Deja Moo.”

Said individual pauses and waits for me to interject and say, “Don’t you mean Deja Vu?”

I keep sipping instead, cringing preemptively, and he continues, “You know Deja Moo, when you’re talking to these big wigs, and you get that feeling you’ve heard this bull before.”

He winks, and I evaporate into the ether to escape the uncomfortable tension between my silence and his double-overed-guffaws.

But I also recognize that not all puns are inherently bad puns, and all people who use them aren’t inherently bad executors of jokes. In fact, I know puns do all kinds of amazing, lofty language transformations that I could probably never accomplish in my own writing. Haryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia is a whole book that is invigorated with the positive mechanisms of the pun.

Outside of humor, Mullen’s puns provide multiple meanings to an etymology, introduce a complexity and depth into the verse, encapsulate multiple identities represented by a single individual, manipulate language to demonstrate an elevated understanding of a languages’ structure, sound, and rules, and show how multiple implicit connotations are crucial in understanding the explicit actions carried out within a culture.

Good puns, and Mullen’s puns are good ones, illustrate the principle that how language is presented and organized actually influences the meaning of a relationship between signifier and signified. Mullen makes us question why language has been shaped in the ways that it has. For example, when she complicates the etymology of “teddy,” incorporating the double meaning of a child’s stuffed toy and a woman’s piece of lingerie, she forces the reader to question the history of the word and the cultural implications of relating an innocent toy to a sexual object of desire.

~ ~ ~

So since puns accomplish all of these extremely interesting, magnanimous, and useful things, why do I instantly turn into Dwight Shrute when someone says, “A noisy pepper gets jalapeno business!”

Or when I read the definitely more poignant, honed, and sophisticated Haryette Mullen poem that starts, “Well bread ain’t refined of coarse dark textures never enriched a doughty peasant,” juxtaposing the mechanical/chemical refining process white bread goes through to the civilization refining process people go through, why do I suddenly go

Is it because I hate being clever?
Is it because I am a debbie downer who hates fun?
Is it because I just hate applied wit with cultural relevance?

Maybe I do. But only in art.

Puns are, more often than not, deliberate and intentional (unless you make the caveat “pun unintended” which actually suggests that you noticed the pun and decided to keep it there anyway. I digress).

Puns are representative of an intense manipulation and control that abandons any sort of natural or spontaneous quality that might be present in the work. But isn’t all artwork a manipulation of resources?

Yes, but my preference lies with unconscious manipulation, with feeling, with instinct, and less with direct intellectualism and political commentary. When the art has the appearance of a heavy hand adding all the right ingredients until we get a product that says get it, I’m doing this, wink wink nudge nudge it starts to enter the realm of political dialogue akin to propaganda, social academic critique, or dystopian philosophy.

Well, does that mean you hate all satire, Katherine? Yeah, a little. If I’m conscious of Aldous Huxley making a grand political statement throughout Brave New World, I stop admiring the aesthetic, the technique, and the structure. Instead, the message begins to slap me across the face repeatedly, and that’s all I can pay attention to. All other artistic elements sort of become subservient to this grand master intentional plan of meaning, and I get grouchy.

But oftentimes I can divorce the meaning from the material, and then I don’t hate it all. For example, Haryette Mullen’s language is beautiful, rhythmic, and delicious in the mouth even without the acknowledgement of her puns. Just listening to the palpable alliteration within that previous poem adds a luxury to it even sans the social critique, “poor got pasty pale and pure.” The oddity and strangeness of the pairs of words gives the reader a feeling of surrealism, a world where you can’t quite find your footing but you know you want to experience it anyway.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for social commentary in art. It’s just not my cup of tea, and I’d rather not acknowledge it. I’m bombarded with critical, cultural, and social commentary on almost every other plane, platform, or screen that you can possibly think of, whether it be TV news networks, Facebook political status rants, Tumblr social justice reblogs, American Government college courses, or the awkward dinner question of “What did you mean when you said Obamacare is good for the country” that Aunt Betsy just won’t stop pressing you about. Maybe if I chew my steak long enough and get a glazed look in the eye she’ll forget that I’m supposed to answer her.

I can resolve my hateful relationship with puns if I never ask the question, “so what is this actually saying,” and I can just appreciate that the writer was able to revel in language. Because when I retreat into art I want to look for the aesthete, the tenderness of a writer simply loving the medium in which she works, the wheelbarrow collecting rain as a mere red object next to a white chicken, the sound of “calabash of water/botanica Yoruba.”