The art of punning

We all remember our college days when poor jokes (PJs to the uninitiated) and puns were the order of the day and helped while away the boring hours. But now Sally Davis writes about the gentle art of punning and traces its ancestry - I kid you not - to Jesus!

Where good humour and refreshments abound, puns seem to follow. Yet this neat little linguistic device - which exploits the multiple meanings of words or phrases that sound the same or similar - is considered by its detractors to be as irritating as it is irrepressible. Pun after all is the use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words. Consider the following:

·       "Heifer cow is better than none, but this is no time for puns" - Groucho Marx

·       "What's the name of a face lotion developed for Jewish women? Oil of Oy Vey" - Arnold Fine

·       "There are three Bachs - Johann, Sebastian and Offenbach" /

·       "I often bark myself" - Victor Borge

In the English-speaking world, punning is viewed as more of a tic than a trick, a pathological condition

The late William Safire, the New York Times's long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun "is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay - a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure".

Straight puns point to the facile cleverness of headline writers and embarrassing uncles. Elsewhere, they tend to be deployed sparingly, and with a dose of irony. How did the pun acquire such a dubious reputation?

John Pollack, a former Clinton speechwriter and author of the book The Pun Also Rises, thinks it fell out of favour during the Enlightenment, when the form's reliance on imprecision and silliness was out of kilter with the prevailing spirit of sophistication and rational inquiry. "Arrant puns" were the subject of attacks by the likes of Joseph Addison, 18th Century London's pre-eminent literary tastemaker. He decried them as debased witticisms and exulted that they had been "banished out of the learned world".

But puncraft did not always suffer from such bad PR.

The Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that "paronomasia", the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Jesus himself was a prodigious punster. His declaration that "upon this rock I will build my church" famously played on the way Peter's name echoed the Ancient Greek word for rock, "petra". Jesus may have also salted his speech with puns on Aramaic words, the language of everyday communication. When he condemns the Pharisees for letting punctilious piety blind them to mercy, Jesus calls them "blind guides, which strain at a gnat [galma], and swallow a camel [gamla]".

Here, then, puns seem to serve a purpose beyond the merely frivolous - to impart shades of meaning in an economical fashion, perhaps, or to render lessons and concepts more vivid and memorable to listeners.In other cases, darker psychological forces may underpin the pun. The humour theorist Charles Gruner has argued that puns are a product of humans' adaptive tendency towards competitiveness. We may groan at puns as an acknowledgement that we have been outplayed by a speaker who has asserted his or her superiority over us. Sigmund Freud, by contrast, identified puns as an admission of weakness, a psychic release-valve in which humour alleviates the stress of repressing unpleasant truths.

Hairdressers are masters of the art. Puns give them a cloak of deniability - the joke permits ordinary folk to make light of their social betters without violating the norms of respect. Sex and death were these characters' favoured subjects - Shakespeare seemed to intuit what Freud would argue some 300 years later, that humour helps us cope with the terrifying and taboo.

The purposes of puns seem to be as diverse as the circumstances in which they appear. But regardless of its rationale, punning is clearly more than a mere linguistic fillip. And there may be reason to hope that the internet will restore its reputation. The efflorescence of punnery on social networking sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, which bulge with the fruits of meme generators, suggests that puns have become acceptable as part of the online conversation.

It may be only a matter of time until the pun rises once again. But for now, its future is an impunderable question.