Word: puns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Muskie is nominated, his aides will doubtless do their best to eliminate some of his worst puns from the national hustings. But once punning gets into the bloodstream, it seems to be as intoxicating as alcohol. Even that master of precooked prose, Richard Nixon, could not resist a pun on the morning after he was elected to the presidency. Referring to a presidential seal that Julie had stitched and framed for him, Nixon described it as "the kindest thing that I had happen, even though it's crewel." That conjures up the frightening vision of a Nixon-Muskie race...
...Though puns may be used to political advantage-or disadvantage-punning has traditionally been more the farm of the artist than the playground of the politician. By punning, which probably derives from the Italian puntiglio (fine point), the writer grows ideas as well as wit. Aristophanes punned, with scatological exuberance, and so did Homer and Cicero. What was occasional in the classicists was fecund nature to Shakespeare. Because he had to play to the galleries, his plays were par for the coarse, brimming with such verbal pratfalls as "Discharge yourself of our company, Pistol." But Shakespeare could also buff...
Even with masters like Shakespeare, the pun is lagniappe, a trick to reconcile opposites, a method of giving a long sentence a parole. It was not until 1922 and Ulysses that James Joyce made it a literature unto itself. In Finnegans Wake, words become quintuple exposures; the reader has to search for a glimpse of something recognizable. In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson explicate a typical and relatively easy example: "Into boudoir Joyce inserts the letter I and converts the word to boudeloire, thus adding a river association, 'Loire.' Clinging...
...pun is the lowest form of wit (a dubious proposition), then it is appropriate that a punning game should have proliferated in Manhattan's art world at this moment of its fortunes. The gimmick, according to the New York Times, was set in motion by Stephen E. Weil, an administrator of the Whitney Museum. It goes like this: pick an artist's name, then make up a question for which it is the answer. Weil's examples...
...Duck? divides a genre into four cavorters: Zeppo, once charitably labeled the Good Looking One; Harpo, Rumpelstiltskin with mild satyriasis; Chico, the Italian Defamation League; and the great, nay immoral Groucho. Under his pun-fulfilled guidance the boys carom delightfully from the primitive surrealism of The Cocoanuts on beyond that neglected antiwar pageant Duck Soup, to the classic double bill, A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera...