Word: puns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pair o' lips now...Apocalypse Now...obviously it has something to do with war. And lips. And music. The ideas spin off the wordplay like sparks: World War Two, our last celebrational war: a U.S.O. troupe, those impetuous combat comedians: lips, something to do with lips. One suspects the pun came first and the show followed--something like falling down the stairs...
...goes for ten or fifteen minutes. Total strangers confronting total strangers, making nervous small talk with artificial poise, watching through narrow eyes for the wrong color of socks, a grammatical slip or affectation, a pun or wisecrack in questionable taste. Then...
...discourse so predictable and boring that any deviation comes as a delightful relief. In his deeply unfunny Essay on Laughter the philosopher Henri Bergson theorized that the act of laughter is caused by any interruption of normal human fluidity or momentum (a pie in the face, a mask, a pun). Slips of the tongue, therefore, are like slips on banana peels; we crave their occurrence if only to break the monotonies. The monotonies run to substance. When that announcer introduced Hoobert Heever, he may also have been saying that the nation had had enough of Herbert Hoover...
...conventions of the Pudding Show are like that--the student writers and performers can take all sorts of liberties as long as they stick within the chief boundaries. The audience is harangued when it hisses a pun: "Go drink some more champagne"; "C'mon, gimme a break, I have to say that every night." But the actors go right ahead with the next pun--that's what the people have paid...
...dance. They kick, tap, waltz, jump, charleston--in Serfs Up! they even roll over and kick their feet in the air. This year's kick-line has excitement, surprises, and laughs, and even if the rest of the show--or the people next to you remarking "Excellent!" at every pun--have left you cold, you won't be bored...