According to communications consultant John Pollack, the author of ‘The Pun Also Rises,’ puns are threatening because they “reveal the arbitrariness of meaning, and the layers of nuance that can be packed onto a single word.”
He told The Atlantic that “people who dislike puns tend to be people who seek a level of control that doesn’t exist.”
“If you have an approach to the world that is rules-based, driven by hierarchy and threatened by irreverence, then you’re not going to like puns,” Pollack explained.
In the meantime, Peter McGraw, the director of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, notes that puns can be “a demonstration of wit, cleverness.”
“You’re relying on a person’s ability to parse language, to understand the nuances and complexities of words.”
In other words, you’re getting more of an ‘aha!’ moment rather than a ‘haha!’ one with puns.
Meanwhile, Pollack emphasizes that there are trends in humor, and tastes naturally shift over time. How (un)popular puns are at the moment depends on society’s relationship with humor, not just the quality of the puns themselves.
“I think another question to ask that’s just as relevant is why is sarcasm considered cool by the same people who often decry puns as uncool? Both are a way of saying one thing and meaning another. In an age of cynicism it’s safer, socially, to tear something down through sarcasm or irony than it is to build something up through punning.”
Previously, Caleb Warren, an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona, known among other things for his TEDx Talk ‘What Makes Things Funny,’ shared his thoughts with us about puns and why they’re so beloved and hated.
“Compared to many other forms of humor, puns are less likely to disgust, offend, or get someone fired,” he told the Bored Panda team during an earlier interview.
“However, puns are divisive in that some people think they are hilarious and others think they are lame (and some think they are both hilarious and lame).”
According to Warren, the benign violation theory of humor argues that “a person experiences humor (laughter, amusement, the perception that something is funny) when something threatens their sense of how the world should be (i.e., a violation), but they are okay with the threat (i.e., the violation is benign).”
And puns rely on relatively mild violations, which may be one of the reasons why some people don’t find them funny.
“With puns, the violation is typically a language or logic violation. Someone uses a word or phrase in a way that it is not supposed to be used (e.g., 'I relish the fact that you’ve mustard the strength to ketchup with me'), but there is an alternative meaning of the word or phrase that seems correct (i.e., benign). In this case, mustard, ketchup, and relish are all the correct ways to spell hot dog condiments,” he told Bored Panda.
