What if I froze, and couldn't come up with a single pun? There had been too many to actually study, but enough to make my mouth go dry with fear. Talk about a bad draw.Īfter reviewing the rules, the judge asked McClughan to reach into a galvanized bucket and pull out a slip of paper, which featured one of the hundred or so topics on a list that my thirty-one fellow competitors and I had been given just minutes earlier. I was already outmatched my adversary was a bespectacled, forty-something man named George McClughan who, as the judge pointed out, just happened to be a former champion. Henry Museum, looking out over a crowd I estimated at five hundred people and trying to calm myself as the emcee - a tall Texan in a straw hat - introduced me and my opponent. I stood on a stage in an Austin park outside the O. In this excerpt, Pollack describes the first round of the competition. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, in Austin, Texas. Pollack, a former presidential speechwriter, was also the winner of the 1995 O. John Pollack makes a case for the cultural significance of the lowly pun in his new book, The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics.
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