2.09.2006

It's all pun and games 'til someone loses their dignity.

It's all pun and games 'til someone loses their dignity.

Back when I was in graduate school, I was writing a thesis on the anthropology of humor or, as some would have it, humorology. In the process of writing (and smoking excessively and drinking much coffee), I began to dream in puns. The worst of these came to me as follows:

The scene is one typical of Medieval literature or fairy tales or, more accurately, the anarcho-syndicalist commune scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I am in a non-descript and entirely stereotypical European village with one cobbly/muddy road running through town and over a hill and off into the countryside. The village is being terrorized, as villages do, by an ogre. The ogre, who is tall, bearded, and beefy (why is that dwarves and ogres are often portrayed with the same basic body types with the only difference being volume - as opposed to proportion, clothing, hirsuteness, etc.), is literally sacking the peasants of the village. That is, he is scooping them up and placing them into a huge burlap bag, which he has flung over his shoulder with a flourish as he prepares to shanté up the path and on out of the village.


Likely copyrighted image of a village-menacing ogre

Here's where the badness comes in. I, smaller in stature than the ogre, but clearly in this dreamworld, superior in derring-do, approach the ogre from behind. I pull out a knife or medieval shiv of some sort and slice open the bottom of the sack, allowing the peasants to tumble out to safety and so that they may return to their drudgery and their Bubonic destinies. Then, with all the anachronistic movie tough guyness I can muster I face down the ogre and boast, "Well, you seem to have met with some unpeasantries."



You guys would totally think I was cool if I dreamt of this orge.

Yeah, awful. The reason I bring this up is that there are certain activities during which people are prone to pun and I've found that blogging is certainly one of them. For instance, in the shower, where most of my dumb ideas occur to me, I've been inundated with terrible puns to use as blog headlines. The only one I can think of now is "To Thine Own Sylph Be True" (a scintillating idea for a blog entry where I simply list my favorite words. "Sylph" is one of them), but I forget most of them between rinse and repeat.

I fully expect that promise of such awful wordplay will really boost readership. Well, at least that second ogre pic is kinda funny.

2 Comments:

At 10:48 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Funny, I dreamt of that ogre in the second pic. Did you steal my dream? :)

 
At 2:24 PM, Blogger evandebacle said...

Is it about me stealing your dreams or about the ogre forcing his way into both of our lives?

 

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