Please Hire the Handicapped

Children first become aware of verbal comedy when they discover the pun (usually in the form of the riddle), and some of the more maladjusted among them keep at it well into their presidency of Random House. Others find niches as small-time embezzlers and semipro blocking backs, but maybe it is unfair to blame their lack of achievement on their taste in wit. Maybe they wouldn’t have done much better if they never spoke at all.

All the same, the wise parent will spot the danger signs early. It is true that spotting the danger signs early does him no earthly good, beyond proving to him that he is a wise parent, but his only alternative is to pretend he hasn’t spotted them, and that’s impossible. My mother, for one, didn’t even try to pretend. I was about eight when I walked into the kitchen bearing a pun-filled magazine and an expression of imminent implosion. “Three brothers began a cattle ranch,” I said, “and it was a big success, but they didn’t have a name for it, and they sent a telegram to their daddy and asked him what they should name it, and their daddy sent back a telegram that said ‘Name the ranch Focus.’ You know why, Mummy?”

Mummy, an Ur-hipster, kept her cool.

“Because,” I cried, “Focus is where the sons raise meat. You get it mummy? — where the sun’s rays . . .”

My mother missed the full explanation, and the explosion of merriment that followed, because she was already out the kitchen door and halfway to her writing table. There she fired off a memorable blast to the editors, excoriating the magazine for “putting this filth in the hands of innocent children,” and canceling her subscription. By “this filth,” my mother meant any pun, no matter how decorous, but the editors could hardly have guessed that.

From that time on I was hooked as pathetically as those people the picture magazines are always doing photo essays about. It wasn’t bad enough that I lived to bring conversation to an agonized halt in hundreds of living rooms; I also found employment that would enable me to do the same in millions of living rooms. Right out of college, I went to work as a writer at Time, and I felt as giddy as a junkie with a passkey to McKesson & Robbins. I felt even better than that, because there were some real mainliners around to teach me the fine points, of which there are a very few.

The inexperienced or incompetent word-man gives himself away immediately by his overeagerness, by his failure, as it were, to make the punishment fit the crime. I remember one editor who in his middle forties stumbled upon the plays of William Shakespeare. The discovery excited him so much that the following week, in connection with an article about the disappearance of the then Brazilian president, Jânio Quadros, he composed a picture caption that read, “Wherefore art thou, Jânio?” He insisted on running this caption despite the gentle pleas of his staff and the overwhelming evidence of the dictionaries that “wherefore” means “why” and not “where,” and that his caption, while erudite, was meaningless. A more seasoned word-man (or Shakespearean) would never have rushed into such a disaster. He would simply have waited until Henry Miller, say, came out with an encyclical upholding the literary validity of pornography. His caption, suitably indignant, would have read, “Wherefore art, thou Romeo?”

Patience, then, is the key to successful wordplay, but patience on a superhuman scale. One writer, whom I will call Jesse, spent several years commenting openly on the people-toed pigeons he observed in New York. He went away to Chicago for two years and commented on the people-toed pigeons in the Windy City. You will agree that this was a pun with a minimal professional future, but Jesse never gave up on it. Finally, on his return to New York, he was assigned an article about the disbanding of the U.S. Army Corps of Carrier Pigeons! Look out below! This, by the way, is the very same Jesse who waited uncomplainingly for nine years before the Mafia got around to squabbling about how to split the proceeds from the prostitution racket. Too many crooks may spoil the brothel for some people, but not for Jesse.

Other masters of the art, not equipped with a memory as relentless as Jesse’s, rely on mnemonic devices, or crib sheets, to preserve their jests for the moment of need. The technique is perfectly honorable, since most of us receive our mightiest inspirations while waiting for a bus or listening to Bruckner (I get mine while shaving). At such times there is rarely a typewriter at hand, much less an appropriate article. Still, it came as a surprise one summer when I was sitting in for the movie critic, a word-man of international renown, to find in his desk drawer a pile of little paper slips, each bearing a disembodied pun. (I swear I wasn’t trying to steal his material; I was looking for whiskey.) “ There’s a fjord in his future,” said one slip, and “a hair of the Doge that bit him,” said another. Over the next few years, the first turned up in his review of a movie about Vikings, the second as a description of revenge among the Medicis.

I am beginning to suspect, indeed, that there may be such a thing as too much patience. For years I have had a little nifty prepared for the newborn child of a ruling monarch. When Queen Elizabeth gave birth to her latest, I offered my gift to a colleague at Newsweek; he turned it down, and I went so far as to phone my old instructors at Time. Too late, they said. Now I have no colleagues, and time is running out. I can’t count on Elizabeth for many more opportunities, after all, and the only other royal birth possibilities seem to be in Holland and Greece. I’m just not convinced that those thrones are important enough. Ah, well, into every reign a little life must fall.