3 min read

A neutron walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “How much for a pint of beer?”

The bartender replies, “For you, no charge.”

No, this isn’t another week when I look at more words and figures of speech walking into their local watering hole. This time around I’ll be taking a look at what qualities make up a good pun – if there is such a thing as a good pun. (Let’s face it, one measure of a “good” pun is just how much groaning it elicits).

One characteristic of a successful pun is its “garden-path sentence” quality, which is defined as “a grammatically correct sentence that begins in such a way that its reader’s most likely interpretation of it will end up being incorrect.”

In other words, in the beginning, we think we know where we’re headed only to be surprised by the unexpected arrival point.

One of the ways in which an effective pun tricks and amuses us is through the use of lexical ambiguity, which is simply the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word.

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Also known as “semantic ambiguity” or “homonymy,” two excellent examples come to us from master punster Groucho Marx, who once observed that “outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

In the above quip, the definition of “outside of” can be either “besides” or “exterior,” with the ensuing confusion resulting in a humorous effect. Marx also observed that “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” In this case, he plays on the different definitions of both “flies” and “like.”

Besides lexical ambiguity, puns can make use of what’s called “syntactic ambiguity,” which is defined as “the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words.”

In other words, a sentence or phrase that contains syntactic ambiguity, which also goes by “structural” or “grammatical ambiguity,” includes the presence of two or more meanings within its structure. One of the best examples of this comes once again from Marx, who recalled, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know.” In this case the ambiguity is clear.

And then there’s antanaclasis, which is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated within a sentence, but the word or phrase means something different each time it appears. A good example of antanaclasis (which comes from the Greek word “antanáklasis” and means “reflection”) is Benjamin Franklin’s warning to his countrymen that “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Finally there’s “reflected meaning,” which was coined by linguist Geoffrey Leech, who defined it as “the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meanings when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense.”

The website Thoughtco.com explains it better by noting that a “joke is usually funny because it uses a word that is technically correct for the situation but that will elicit a different, often opposite image in the mind of the listener.”

I mean just think of the material a standup comedian could come up with following a visit to Intercourse, Pennsylvania (a real town established in Lancaster County in 1754).

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].