Punning: The Candidate at Word and Ploy

By * Stefan Kanfer

IN his scramble for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Edmund Muskie has uttered several statements so shocking to the sensibilities that his own aide has called them "a disease." Candidate Muskie obviously regards them as pretty amusing. Actually, both men are correct; Muskie has simply succumbed to paronophilia--the inordinate love of puns. Twice in New Hampshire he has assured audiences that the state cannot be taken for granite, and at the state capital he announced to a stunned reporter: "We just Concord the statehouse." At defenseless Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he counted the house and cracked to his audience: "I can see that things are Coeequal here."

Overseas, his punshots have gone wilder. While in Cairo before going on to Russia last year, he asked to visit the mosque containing Nasser's burial place. "After all," he said, "we're on our way to Mosque-Cow, aren't we?" At the tomb, when a member of his party removed his shoes according to Islamic custom and revealed a hole in his sock, Muskie shrugged: "We're in a holy place, aren't we?" When he learned that the Russians were being difficult and might not issue visas to his press entourage, he had one ready for that too: "Well, Soviet."

If 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 in which the two candidates pun for the presidency.

Puns are not newcomers to the primitive art of political mayhem. Adlai Stevenson, whose puns were superior to both Muskie's and Nixon's, once characterized Barry Goldwater as "a man who thinks everything will be better in the rear future"; he declared on another occasion: "He who slings mud generally loses ground." Franklin Roosevelt's foes insisted on calling his bright young advisers "the Drain Trust" and referring to some of his programs as ushering in a new "Age of Chiselry." In the 1800s the critics of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli labeled him England's Jew d'Esprit.

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 the pun until it shone like art. Says the bleeding Mercutio: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." "You see how this world goes," Lear says to the blind Gloucester. "I see it feelingly," Gloucester replies.

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 to the word also are the French associations, bonder, 'to pout' and bone, 'mud.' " Not to men tion a reference to the poet Baudelaire. After you've grappled with Finnegans Wake, any pun seems accessible.

A simpler, journalistic style of punning was created by the Algonquin Round Table of the '20s and '30s. Dubbed the Vicious Circle, it became Prohibition's bottlefield, where columnists tailed their wags and reported puns the instant they were composed. When a Vassar girl eloped, Playwright George S. Kaufman announced that she had "put the heart before the course." Dorothy Parker confessed that in her own poetry she was always "chasing Rimbauds." Alexander Woollcott knew of "a cat hospital where they charged $4 a weak purr." Heywood Broun, drinking a bootleg liquor, sighed, "Any port in a storm." "The groans that greet such puns," claims Milton Berle (who once joked that he had cut off his nose to spite his race), "are usually en vious. The other person wishes he had said it."

Language, like the world it represents, can never be static. Even today the pun survives fitfully in tabloid headlines: JUDGES WEIGH FAN DANCER'S ACT, FIND IT WANTON. It survives in the humor of S.J. Perelman, the only post-Joycean writer capable of fluent bilingual flippancy: "lox vobiscum," "the Saucier's Apprentice," and the neo-Joycean "Anna Trivia Pluralized." The pun makes its happiest regular appearance in the work of Novelist Peter De Vries, who writes stories about compulsive punners. "I can't stop," he claims. "I even dream verbal puns. Like the one in which a female deer was chasing a male deer. I woke up and realized it was a doe trying to make a fast buck."

Like the limerick, the pun may well be a folk-art form that defies condescension, scorn and contempt, and possess es the lust for survival of an amoeba. There will always be some, like that formidable adamant, Vladimir Nabokov, who believe that the pun is mightier than the word, that people who cannot play with words cannot properly work with them. "A man who could call a spade a spade," Oscar Wilde remarked, "should be compelled to use one."

With a little encouragement a man can bounce and juggle phrases all his life. That few do -- and fewer still do well -- may be the fault of formal education, which overstresses the discipline of sequential facts. Tired of such lock steps, the mind takes leaps -- sometimes to fresh revelation. The pun is such a jump, but politicians, above all, should look be fore they leap. If puns are to be part of this year's political campaigns, it is to be hoped that the efforts will improve. Already Muskie's punning has begun to work up a backlash.

His opponents are telling the apocryphal story of the Eskimo chairman of Senator George McGovern's Alaska campaign, who was giving a speech in favor of the Senator recently when a group of Muskie supporters began heckling him, drowning him out with boos and whistles. The Eskimo's comeback: "Hush, you Muskies!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.