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Poet James Merrill had a lot to say about puns on puns, including:
A pity about that lowest form of humor. It is suffered, by and large, with groans of aversion, as though one had done an unseemly thing in adult society, like slipping a hand up the hostess's dress. Indeed, the punster has touched, and knows it if only for being so promptly shamed, upon a secret, fecund place in language herself. The pun’s objet trouvé aspect cheapens it further – why? A Freudian slip is taken seriously: it betrays its maker’s hidden wish. The pun (or the rhyme, for that matter) "merely" betrays the hidden wish of words.
Which elicited a response from Mulu Konuk Blasing, including the following sentence:
Puns escape the idealizing economy of referential and representational substitution, since their multiple meanings are coeval, residing in the letters of the word.
A more full story can be found here.
Hmm.
By the way, I was researching Merrill because I just ordered a book of poetry by him called "Divine Comedies." Any of you brilliant kids read his stuff?
A pity about that lowest form of humor. It is suffered, by and large, with groans of aversion, as though one had done an unseemly thing in adult society, like slipping a hand up the hostess's dress. Indeed, the punster has touched, and knows it if only for being so promptly shamed, upon a secret, fecund place in language herself. The pun’s objet trouvé aspect cheapens it further – why? A Freudian slip is taken seriously: it betrays its maker’s hidden wish. The pun (or the rhyme, for that matter) "merely" betrays the hidden wish of words.
Which elicited a response from Mulu Konuk Blasing, including the following sentence:
Puns escape the idealizing economy of referential and representational substitution, since their multiple meanings are coeval, residing in the letters of the word.
A more full story can be found here.
Hmm.
By the way, I was researching Merrill because I just ordered a book of poetry by him called "Divine Comedies." Any of you brilliant kids read his stuff?
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From:
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Damned if I can remember what the title of the story was, or who wrote it, but (as you can see) the concept was interesting enough to have stayed with me all these years.