September 2nd, 2004

A collection of quotes from famous punsters…

Fred Allen: “Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.”

Ambrose Bierce: “A form of wit, to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.”

James Boswell: “Among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.”

Anthony Burgess: “Plurality of reference is in the very nature of language, and its management and exploitation is one of the joys of writing.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “May be the lowest, but is the most harmless kind of wit, because it never excites envy.”

John Dryden: “To torture one poor word ten thousand ways.”

Henry Erskine: “It is the very lowest form, and therefore the foundation of all wit.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “There is no such thing as a female punster.” [Ahem... I beg to differ.]

Victor Hugo: “Le calembour est la fiente de l’esprit qui vole.”

Samuel Johnson: “If I were punished for every pun I shed, there would not be left a puny shred of my punnish head.”

Charles Lamb: “It fills the mind, it is as perfect as a sonnet… better.”

Leonard L. Levinson: “A joke based on the infirmities of language.”

Christopher Morley: “Language on vacation.”

Edgar Allen Poe: “Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.” Also: “The goodness of the true pun is in direct ratio to its intolerability.”

Sydney Smith: “The wit of words. They are exactly the same to words which wit is to ideas, and consist in the sudden discovery of relations in language.”

Jonathan Swift: “A talent which no man effects to despise, but he that is without it.”

Louis Untermeyer: “Something every person belittles and everyone attempts.”

Entry Filed under: Undercover Geek