Bad Puns Are How Eye Roll

Inside the ruthless and quick-witted world of pun competitions

- Peter Rubin

ON THE SURFACE, my opponent wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, in his late 30s, wearing a polo shirt, plaid shorts and a baseball cap. He looked completely at ease, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.

“I hate all people named John,” he said with bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John dis!” The crowd roared. John dis. Jaundice. A glorious, groan inducing precision strike of a pun.

If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Seeing Jeopardy! superstar Ken Jennings on a competing team would ruin anyone’s trivia night. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers.

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships “Punslingers” competition are simple: two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in five seconds gets you eliminated; make a non-pun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world.

My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?