Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 25, 2016

And speaking of peers… consider the puns of Piers Anthony. He’s written books with pun-like titles such as Centaur Aisle, Crewel Lye, Board Stiff, Air Apparent, and so on… and on… and on, ad nauseam. If it’s possible to create a scale of punnery from elegant at one end to Stoop Id (See what I did there?) on the other, Anthony’s are among the worst of the worst. I’d argue that the ones usually appearing in this space are almost as bad. A great pun, a truly elegant one, preserves the logic and sense of meaning of two different terms in a single expression. One of the most elegant puns is from Jesus, who referred to Herod as “that fox” which scholars tell us is (in Hebrew, or was it Aramaic?) a pun on the sound of the NAME Herod and the NOUN that meant “fox”. So he has it both ways… referring to the king by name in one sense and calling him a name in another. A lousy pun is simply substituting a sound alike word for another and losing one (or both!) actual common sense meanings. Pig’s “pun” above might more charitably be called a rebus, the use of pictures to represent sounds. My point is that ANY CHILD COULD CREATE “PUNS” OF THIS KIND. (No birdy aviary soar any wing to eagle it. Voila! Five bird puns in one phrase!) Sometimes the puns in this strip are funny because of how elaborately tortured is the phrasing that is required to execute them. But too often they are just stupid (arising from some stoop’s id) and meaningless. Sometimes even that works, as in today’s strip in which the very stupidity is the whole point, self deprecatingly so. And maybe the entire corpus of punnery over the months/years of this strip function as one looooonnnngggg and elaborate joke. But the individual strips, in isolation, just seem… lazy, phoned-in, of the even-a-child-could-do-better variety. There, I’ve said my peace (!!!!).