Puns and Wordplay

Comedy writer Jack Bernhardt describes puns as little nuggets of comedy genius.  Comedy, he says, is often about taking two disparate things which are barely linked and finding parallels between them.  Jack performs a piece specially written for the Verb exploring perhaps one of the world’s best punsters, James Bond.   

Sam Leith is Literary Editor of the Spectator.  Sam says puns disrupt an ordinary way of looking at language.  They create a kind of wormhole between one part of the vocabulary and another, and that’s why they’re useful for more than just being funny. Puns he says are fundamental to what makes poetry work.  Sam’s book ‘Our Times in Rhymes: Being a Prosodical Chronicle of Our Damnable Age’ is published by Square Peg.  

Artist and composer, Hannah Catherine Jones says “every performance I do, every artwork, every title is a pun.”  Her alter ego ‘Foxy Moron’ is the embodiment of the pun, which she explores to reveal the relationship between language and action.  Her first recognition of the power of the pun was aged just three.  Hannah performs - unusually for her - an untitled piece, composed for The Verb.  

Poet and performer, Nasser Hussain’s collection “SKY WRI TEI NGS” (Coach House Books) are poems made entirely from the three letter Airport codes we all know from our boarding passes. The pun, he says, is “the engine of change in language, you can’t slip from one idea to another is meaning is fixed.  I live in that kind of space where you can stack up meanings and references on top of each other.”