The 41st Annual O. Henry Museum Pun-Off World Championships will take place this coming week down in Austin, Texas, and I’d been thinking of surprising a dear friend of mine by entering his name as a contestant, until I realized the contest is being held on Shabbos. Many of us have friends like this whom, now and then, we’d like to send to somewhere far away. Or at least to Far Rockaway — unless, like me, you live in Far Rockaway.

We’re talking, after all, about groan men. These people fail to provide any excuse for their behavior, despite being afflicted with an actual condition — it’s called paronomasia-itis — for which the least they can do is bring a letter from a doctor; a simple M or D will do. In my friend’s case, his love of puns started young and when pun-ishments didn’t work to stop him, his father decided to seek professional intervention. But his mother said, “Leave him alone, he’s just going through a phrase.” If only.

Paronomasia-itis, by the way, is a word I coined for those suffering from paronomasia, which derives from the Greek for “to alter in meaning.” Speaking of altering, there are some puns that the paronomasiacs who’ll gather next Shabbos at the O. Henry Pun-Off will just never get, however hard they try. An example: “What do Kohanim and tailors have in common? They both make altar rations.” And as those in Austin shake their heads in confusion, all I’d be able to say to them is: Right now, I’ll bet Jewish you were Jewish, don’t you?

In his book entitled Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions, Joe Berkowitz shares some insights into the nature of puns and the people who love — or hate — them, the latter, of course, making up the vast majority of humankind, and for that matter, every other kind I’m aware of. He observes, for example, that puns are the exception to other types of humor in that “people like them when they’re terrible as much as they do when they’re great. They just don’t like them anywhere in between.” He explains that once puns have passed “a certain threshold of Bad, their very badness suddenly becomes the joke itself. Now it’s anti-comedy.”

But he also notes that when “puns are truly great, though, it’s undeniably impressive. There’s a kind of math undergirding most jokes, but puns are especially equational. Making one out of unlikely elements floating around in the air is like solving a verbal speed-puzzle. The best ones make you wonder how on earth a person came up with something so perfect so quickly.”

Take my above-mentioned friend. (And here I pause to allow readers five seconds to mentally add, “…please.”) Once, when he returned from a vacation, my son said, “We missed you!” But my friend was ready: “So why don’t you reload and shoot again?”

And just yesterday, he was walking by an electric company repair crew busy at work on our block, removing a damaged wooden utility pole from the ground and inserting a new one. Sizing up the situation with lightning speed, my friend let loose: “Forget about computers. This is what you call logging in!”

MUCH AS I HATE TO ADMIT IT, that was a very sharp play on woods. In fact, it was sheer brilliance. To which my friend would doubtless respond, “Yeah, I could’ve been a great rosh yeshivah.”

Although I don’t believe that the creativity of ferreting out the two or more meanings in a word or phrase is necessarily transferable to being able to successfully posit tzvei dinim in a sugya, there certainly is a place for puns in the service of kedushah. Each Rosh Hashanah eve, when we partake of the various simanim for a coming shanah tovah, we are enjoined to employ this very form of linguistic dexterity in choosing the appropriate foods for that purpose.

And then, of course, there’s always Purim, when merriment of all kinds, including with words, is in order. Although Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” I think the experience of the sons of Haman disproves his point: They hung together, and still ended up hanging together.

Their father, meanwhile, hung over his own house, 50 amos up in the air, and according to the Midrash remained there for 11 months. Now, that’s what you call swinging a good deal. And ever since, we Jews have been commemorating his fate, with some merely getting high and others being machmir to go for a real hangover (although no one I know is machmir to do so for 11 months). As for Achashveirosh, who, in a fit of pique, gave the word to hoist Haman high, I wonder whether he might later have experienced regret similar to that which he felt after doing away with Vashti, and, turning to his servants, said, “I really don’t like it when you hang on my every word…”

Berkowitz is not the only student of the art of punning who sees great value in this much-derided form of word play. John Pollack, a past winner of the aforementioned O. Henry competition and the author of The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics, says that “the brain goes through some incredible gymnastics to capture the meaning of puns. And if you think about it, it’s incredibly complex…. It enables you to pack more layers of meaning into fewer words. And so if you’re trying to convey complex ideas, puns can be really powerful tools to do that.”

Given Pollack’s fondness for playing around with words, it didn’t surprise me, either, to learn that he also served as a speechwriter for Bill Clinton, he of the uncertainty as to what the meaning of “is is.” Twenty years later, I don’t think anyone is unsure about the meaning of ISIS. Nor is it any wonder that Mr. Pollack wrote a book about how the pun “changed history,” given that his erstwhile White House boss was very skilled at changing his story many times over.

Berkowitz writes that

“the English language is almost nightmarishly expansive, and yet there is no good way to respond when someone drops a bad pun in casual conversation. ‘Stop’ seems ideal, but it’s too late — they already did it. If your esophagus cooperates, you can mimic a human chuckle, or you can just steamroll through, ignoring the elephant now parked in your conversational foyer…. In fairness, puns all too frequently are the lowest-hanging comedy fruit. At one point or another, we’ve all plucked one indiscriminately and ruined someone’s day.”

In the final analysis (which, I’m told, is exactly what Freud said as he ended his last session), who am I to pass judgment on my friend for his taste in what’s funny, even if it might occasionally ruin someone’s day? After all, what’s humorous to you, don’t do unto anoth… I mean, what’s humorous to one person, is to an orthopedist just the bone running from shoulder to elbow (otherwise known as the punny bone).

Sure, I’m a bona fide pun-dit with my own view on things, but still, I believe in “to each his own.” Or, as they say, shivim punim….

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 709. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com