Poetry With Puns

I said “war, ore, door”

"I'VE HAD ALL I CAN STANZA AND CAN'T STANZA NO MORE!"

I really want to have a daughter and name her Zelda.

I imagine, as she gets older she will spend all her time writing sick poetry and rhymes in her journal, growing her hair down to her back, not to spite me, but so she can donate it later, and expand her wit by studying improv comedy through highschool.

As she becomes famous, I hope she will invite me to one of her rap battles and put me in the front row. My heart will grow as she takes the stage, but fatherly intuition tells me something is wrong...Zelda is frozen at the microphone.

I see her up on the stage, eyes alight with fright, hair pulled tight into a bun. She and I lock eyes, a moment of silence passes and serenity slowly enters...THIS is the moment we have been waiting for all our lives.

Looking up calmly, I couldn't be more proud as I exclaim, "Rap puns, Zel. Rap puns, Zel! Let down your hair!"

Today was the first day of his class, Special Topics in Poetry. We walk in and there is a guest with some ceramic art. We thought we were gonna write poems about it or some shit, but then the professor says, "Welcome to special topics in pottery."

The whole class is like wat...?

Then the guest lady starts showing a powerpoint of some of her work and then we literally spent the whole class mushing clay and making bowls and shit.

To make things even dadder, he chuckled "poetry pottery heh heh heh" like we didn't get the joke and he had to explain it to us.

I'm currently running my players through a D&D adventure titled "Curse of Strahd".

Last session, my players found a journal revealing details about the main villain, Count Strahd Von Zarovich. When they acquired it, I passed the adventure book over--opened up to an illustration depicting the journal's pages--and one of the players proceeded to read. After struggling for a bit, he said, "I'm having a tough time reading this cause it's so cursive."

Yes," I responded. "It's the cursive Strahd."

I had that one chambered and ready for weeks, just waiting for the right moment.

What my players don't know is that I'm also going to include a few other bits of flavor for my them to find as they progress through the game:

• A fancy handbag with the initials "SVZ" hammered into the leather... the "purse of Strahd"
• A grave in which the Von Zarovich family nanny is buried... the "nurse of Strahd"
• A carriage very obviously built to accommodate Strahd's coffin... the "hearse of Strahd"
• A book full of poetry written during Strahd's younger days, before he was consumed by darkness... the "verse of Strahd"

I have written this book to sweep away all misunderstandings about the crafty art of punnery and to convince you that the pun is well worth celebrating.... After all, the pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are much more likely to run into a pun than into a sword. [A pun is a witticism involving the playful use of a word in different senses, or of words which differ in meaning but sound alike.]

Scoffing at puns seems to be a conditioned reflex, and through the centuries a steady barrage of libel and slander has been aimed at the practice of punning. Nearly three hundred years ago John Dennis sneered, “A pun is the lowest form of wit,” a charge that has been butted and rebutted by a mighty line of pundits and punheads.

Henry Erskine, for example, has protested that if a pun is the lowest form of wit, “It is, therefore, the foundation of all wit.” Oscar Levant has added a tag line: “A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.” John Crosbie and Bob Davies have responded to Dennis with hot, cross puns: “...If someone complains that punning is the lowest form of humor you can tell them that poetry is verse.”

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century self-appointed custodian of the English language, once thundered, “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the national till without remorse... ”

Joseph Addison pronounced that the seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and tho’ they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius, that which is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art.

Far from being invertebrate, the inveterate punster is a brave entertainer. He or she loves to create a three-ring circus of words: words clowning, words teetering on tightropes, words swinging from tent tops, words thrusting their head into the mouths of lions. Punnery can be highly entertaining, but it is always a risky business. The humor can fall on its face, it can lose its balance and plunge into the sawdust, or it can be decapitated by the snapping shut of jaws. While circus performers often receive laughter or applause for their efforts, punsters often draw an obligatory groan for theirs. But the fact that most people groan at, rather than laugh at, puns doesn’t mean that the punnery isn’t fu

My sister posted about loving my little ponies, and we got on the topic of rainbow horse poop jokes. My dad just pops in with this:

Dad - I can't think of one right now. I do, however, have a poem that is somewhat related: (first assume standard high-class poetry recitation position; head high, chest out, hands clasped behind back, heels together, toes @ 180 degrees, knees slightly bent): "In days of old, when knights were bold, and toilets weren't invented; they left their load beside the road, and went away contented."