Essay

This pun's on me

By Samantha Loong

I love puns. I blame this on watching too many hours of Fozzie Bear on The Muppets TV show as a child. His jokes were bad and his puns were worse, but he was just so endearing that I ended up becoming equally as endeared to the puns themselves. I love good puns and I love bad puns; although some might argue that there's no such thing as a good pun.

I've been such a fan of puns that in my last CV, I confidently stated that one of my hobbies was "Making bad puns." My former workmates said that they almost didn't hire me because of that, as they pictured someone dropping puns at every opportunity. But I kept tabs on myself and made sure I never spun out of control.

What I love about making puns is that they break the ice with people. You're essentially exposing how uncool you are by punning in public. But in my experience this also shows how unthreatening you are, and usually leads to people warming to you.

For stand-up comedians in the Western world however, nothing quite gives an audience the cold shivers like a pun on stage. Punning is generally frowned upon as it's seen as a bit lazy for a professional comedian. But for a language learner, being able to pun in the language you're learning shows an understanding of many aspects of that language, including pronunciation, customs and idioms. It involves noticing all these things and making — sometimes stretching — connections between them. The faster you can make the connection, the more likely you are to be able to pun on the spot.

Understanding and making jokes in another language is always difficult, but when I moved to Japan and discovered that I was starting to notice pun possibilities in Japanese, my confidence in the language grew very quickly. I've heard puns called "dad jokes" in English, which shares its equivalent meaning with the Japanese oyaji gyagu. I'm not sure if it's only dads who make these jokes, but it so happened that it was one of my Japanese host dads who first showed me the way of the pun. I remember having learned some new Japanese words and noticed that two of them had the same sound. I had a possible pun in my head, but didn't know what to do with it. That evening, while watching an episode of Pokemon with my host family, we started discussing what one of the creatures was. And out of my host dad's mouth came the pun I had been thinking about: "It's a duck ... maybe." The rest of my host family groaned, while I beamed with a mixture of awe, pride and joy. This was the beginning of my Japanese punning life.

It wouldn't be right to end an essay on puns without a joke, so here's one from Fozzie Bear himself: Why did the elephant quit the circus? Because he was sick of working for peanuts.

Shukan ST: JULY 13, 2012

(C) All rights reserved