The Sun.
London, England, 1864-04-07 00:00:00

Pundemoniva.

Puns are not popular in modern drawing-rooms, and pro-
bably never were really popular anywhere. A pun may
contain a joke as a nutshell may contain a kernel, or not
But the number of people who understand a jeke off-has
is very limited ; end it is obviously inconvenient to have a
joke cracked in your presence if you don't know on the spa
of the moment how to treat it. ziomething may be done by
the formula of saying " how very bad 1" to everything is
the nature of a joke that everybody ventures on ; but if the
joke happens to be very good, and there is a sprinkling Of
wits pre,-ent, who "know a joke when they hear it," the
dull men who says " how very bad" in the wrong place is
himself in a false position. Dull men, who are the maj
have made an effort to confuse good and bad in jokes by the
theory that jokes are "good in proportion to their badnesei
and that "how very bad" may be a protest or a compliment
provisionally, as the joke may prove successful or stillborn.
But on the whole dull men dislike jukes when there is any
responsibility attached to themselves in appreciating or re-
probating these troublesome Squibs and crackers. The
authorised wits joke and laugh at one another's jokes in a
spirit of muuual accommodation; and society is obliged to
accept a few recognised humorists at whose sayings, good
or bad, they laugh principally by faith.
Society takes its revenge on the small, ye ung, and unac-
knowledged wits by snubbing them as much as possible.
And, on the wide average, wide reason. For wit is like
poetry in the rarity of the girt and the multitude of pre-
tenders to it. Mere punning is to wit what mere versifica-
tion is to poetry. The wit seizes a numerous and unex-
pected collateral meaning in a commonplace phrase, by
which, without dislocating the sequence of ordinary con-
ventional talk, he conveys, to those who see its point, some
keen insinuation of satire, some vivid conviction of absur-
dity. But if he is a good wit, such as society tolerates, the
blunt end of his remark must pass muster as sense, if the
company fail to perceive the point at the. sharp end of it.
The pun pure and simple, the pun impertinent and ob-
noxious, instead of letting in a flash of the intense through
a rift in the commonplace, thrusts in the blunt end of
commonplace double meaning on some casual word perhaps
occurring in a discussion of interest. This is a bore ; and
as desperate punsters in barbarous days were guilty of this
turpitude, they brought puns into such bad odour that the
infliction has been almost extirpated from society. But the
bad habit, banished from private life, has taken refuge en
the stage. Dull men congregated in large bodies seem to
like the very worst jokes, and at Easter and Christmas time
Pandemonium is let loose in extravaganzas and burlesques.
Released from the pressure of intersocial criticism, punning
has in these gradually swollen to a magnitude and malignity
which the old punmen never dreamed of. Our forefathers
used to pun at worst on single words, but the modern fashion
is to dislocate whole sentences. Wit remains as rare as ever;
but the mechanical substitute has advanced in elaborate
complication with the scientific appliances of the age. The
motto of the Comic News is s typical example of this phrase-
excruciating conceit. Ifoni soil qui 'nal y yense is thus
Englished—" On his walk he madly puns." It is melan-
choly to think of the labour this effort must have cost, and
when the feat is performed there is no fun in it.
Now we wish to speak seriously to those three busy B's,
Messrs. Brough, Byron, and Burnand, who seem to employ
each shining and shady hour of their lives in cudgelling
their brains for fresh forms of word-torture. Cease your
punning, gentlemen, at any rate in your dramatic works.
Your best quips are really thrown away on your audiences•
They don't " take" above one joke out of a score, and usually
miss the most ingenious altogether —The Realm.