The Pun Also Rises: Review and Free Giveaway

PunAlsoRises final The Pun Also Rises: Review and Free Giveaway The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack

Release date: 2011 / 154 pages

Synopsis (from the back cover): Some people may dismiss puns as the lowest form of humor. But this attitude is a relatively recent development in the sweep of history…

First Sentence: Lightning flashed, the plane bucked, and another gasp swept the cabin.

Review: I agreed to read and review The Pun Also Rises because I truly love language — and Pollack’s history of the pun thoroughly unpacks this one aspect of language. He does work in his own puns here and there — and includes many examples of puns throughout (“This was a time when philosophers, writers and scientists were spinning revolutionary ideas — Isaac Newton, among others, was a regular at the Grecian — and even single words carried gravity…”) but this is not primarily a “book of humor.”

However, by the time I finished reading, I had tagged eleven different passages to include in my review! I will try to integrate a number of these passages throughout. For example, in The Pun Also Rises Pollack makes a persuasive case for the following proclamation about the persuasive influence of the pun:

“In the broadest terms, alphabetic writing suddenly endowed humans with the means to transmit detailed information with accuracy, both over distance and time. This enabled us to accumulate and expand upon human knowledge; to explore, explain and exchange increasingly complex ideas; to articulate challenging questions and search out novel answers — all critical to the sudden acceleration of human knowledge and achievement after hundreds of thousands of years of glacial progress… What enabled this key breakthrough? …the human capacity to recognize the distinctions between sound, symbol and meaning, and our inclination to recombine them in assemblages of infinite variety — in a word, punning.”

The book begins with Pollack winning the eighteenth annual world pun championships and his passion for wordplay is admirable. I’ll admit, the introduction was my favorite part of this work since it was the most narrative. Pollack’s airplane nearly crashes on the way to the championships, but he survives and recounts a series of head-to-head battles that are hilarious and impressive. The rest of the work is quite cerebral and historical and is not a page turner (which the introduction was), but I am glad I spent a few hours learning about the power of the pun and Pollack convinced me of its worth.

In his history of the pun, Pollack includes the origins and complexities (“…puns require the brain to maintain multiple meanings of a word simultaneously, rather than simply suppressing the competionion or choosing an outright winner, as it often does when confronted with ambiguity… [the success of a pun] all comes down to how a person’s brain perceives and resolves ambiguity…”), purpose (“To unlock humorous content hiding beneath the surface of a joke, one needs the right key, and that key is specific but unstated common knowledge that the joke’s teller and listener both share“), popularity (“according to Noam Chomsky, just about every sentence we say or hear is a recombination of existing words appearing in that exact configuration for the very first time. And it’s that profusion of possibility that probably makes punning ubiquitous across so many diverse cultures“) and significance (“…the more rigid a society becomes, the greater its reliance on subtexts, especially puns, to address sensitive or taboo topics“) – and is quite comprehensive.

I now not only appreciate the humor in puns, but appreciate their gravity, as well:

“Puns, by revealing the inherent instability of language, work in much the same way. In one sense they are a tacit acknowledgment of the rules, because you have to know a rule if you’re going to cleverly break it. But at the same time, by scrambling the relationship between sound, symbol and meaning, puns reveal that te words we use to define the world around us are ultimately just arbitrary signs.”

Interested in winning a free copy? Drop me a comment below and I will choose a lucky winner by the weekend! Feel free to check out the other stops on the tour, too:

Thursday, April 14th: Luxury Reading

Friday, April 15th: Reading Through Life

Monday, April 18th: Book Club Classics!

Tuesday, April 19th: SparksMarks

Wednesday, April 20th: Book Hooked Blog

Thursday, April 21st: Life is a Patchwork Quilt

Monday, April 25th: The Broke and the Bookish

Tuesday, April 26th: Rundpinne

Wednesday, April 27th: It’s All About Books

Thursday, April 28th: eclectic/eccentric

Friday, April 29th: In the Next Room

Monday, May 2nd: Booksnob