Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit, but as the semester wraps up, I wanted to ask for your help. Over the years, punning has become a more and more integral part of our lab meetings. It's reached the point, in fact, that our P.I. can barely utter a single non-pun sentence, even outside of the lab. On a recent plane trip, he tempted fate by punning with airport security when the refused to let him take his yogurt on the plane, yelling, "These people are discriminating against my culture!" We're also not entirely convinced that he isn't with his wife because she called her ex-husband a "faux-pa," in reference to his parenting.
Yeah, it's that bad.
So, with all these puns flying around, I've decided that it is imperative that we do a study on puns. I'm pretty sure we'll need to do some imaging, too. The thing is, we can't find a lot of actual research on puns (just a bit on cue competition, ambiguity resolution, and suppression, though only in a couple cases is it directly applied to puns). So, my request to you is, a.) do you know of any research outside of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics on puns, and b.) can you give me some puns of your own? Remember, it's all in the name of science, so don't be shy. Give me the worst puns you can possibly conjure.
Comments
I have been known to make so many puns, my friends dubbed me The Punisher.
My other comment would be, research on puns? what, you didn't find any the first time you searched?
Posted by: cephyn | May 7, 2008 2:45 PM
Discussing allergies with friends, my wife said that she is pretty much allergic to anything "airborn".
I said, "yeah, and when the 101st drops down, it's horrid."
Posted by: Joe Shelby | May 7, 2008 2:52 PM
Oh man!!!
Posted by: Chris | May 7, 2008 3:04 PM
I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit
shall be so bold as to ask, what gentlemen plays the game of excuse and explanation? stand as you were; not as you wish to be.
sincerely,
c.v. snicker
Posted by: chet snicker | May 7, 2008 3:10 PM
Ogden Nash:
Posted by: Scott Belyea | May 7, 2008 3:11 PM
Not a study but a good read: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson.
They are absolutely stuffed with puns.
There is a usenet group: alt.humor.puns
Own puns:
I knew a lumberjack, before he got axed.
Or the beekeeper who is trying to bee all that he can.
The local baker quit, he couldn't make puns.
Know why the dockworkers went on strike? Their pay got docked.
Heard about the general who was in bed with the enemy? He was trying to make love not war.
Punning isn't for groan-ups.
Heard about the camera manufacturer that got shuttered?
I had a pen friend until they fried his bacon.
Posted by: Who Cares | May 7, 2008 3:16 PM
First off. HAHAHA to the "discriminating against my culture!". That made my day here.
Second, for some reason I seem to put puns and metaphors in the same category of human abilities. Kinda weird since one is based on abstractions and the other on dual meaning. And yet I think of them as the same thing. What they DO have in common is; "human ablity to see stuff from different views/perspectives". Maybe i should postulate a cognitive module for creative thinking for it...
If anybody could enlighten me from my ill conceived attempts at lone brainstorming? :)
Anyways. Just thinking openly.
Love your site!
_Jon Nordland.
Posted by: Jon Nordland | May 7, 2008 3:24 PM
You heard what happened to Frankenstein? He had a brainstorm
Posted by: Who Cares | May 7, 2008 3:28 PM
Long ago I was asked to help get rid of some paperwork by an old boss, an Italian. He said ''Euripides, I rippa doze'' and laughed to himself all afternoon ( you can?t make this stuff up..)
Posted by: memorabilious | May 7, 2008 3:44 PM
As long as you don't get embossed.
Posted by: Who Cares | May 7, 2008 3:50 PM
I had a friend who entered an internet pun competition once. You were allowed to submit as many puns as you wanted, so he thought for a while and submitted the ten best ones he could think of. He hoped one of them would win, but sadly, no pun in ten did.
Posted by: Gebstadter | May 7, 2008 5:17 PM
@Jon
Indeed, puns and metaphors are clearly both examples of conceptual blending.
Posted by: serapio | May 7, 2008 9:28 PM
Rumor is that Chris' dad used to be among the worst punners. He often said that "Wierd is relative. In fact, most of your relatives." Maybe too often.
Posted by: CA | May 7, 2008 11:10 PM
serapio, with that comment, you've just become my new favorite commenter... heh. Anyone else who makes a joke at the expense of the cognitive linguists, in any comment thread, will also be my favorite commenter. Have at it. Also, expect a post railing -- and I mean railing -- against cognitive linguistics soon. I'm disgusted, and the only thing holding me back is that at this moment, I don't think I can say what I want to say with even a modicum of temperance.
And my dad is a pretty bad punner, 'tis true. Perhaps there are Freudian reasons why I want to study this now.
Posted by: Chris | May 8, 2008 1:09 PM
There's a short story by Asimov in "Robot Dreams", I think, where a grandmaster teaches a supercomputer to tell jokes. The analysis on jokes reveals that our sense of humor is an artificial part of an extraterrestrial experiment. Once the grandmaster discovers this, the sense of humor was taken away from all humans, leaving people with only their natural, unfunny, self-developed form of joke: the pun.
Worth checking out =)
Posted by: anon | May 9, 2008 12:11 PM
You might want to contact one of the authors on this paper:
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/19/10/1706
Posted by: Al | May 10, 2008 12:57 PM