The Pun-icle of Humor

Jim Shores learned about puns in a high school language class when an instructor, explaining the concept, made a very lame joke — telling a student to “oh-pun the door.” Despite a botched introduction, Shores grew a fondness for puns. He appreciates that it takes a level of background information and analysis to get a joke.

Jim Shores stands in front of his 15 binders filled with puns, along with a wooden 3-D puzzle. He’s collected puns from newspapers, brochures and advertisements for over 25 years. Credit: Jack Harvel

“I like the ones that are just a little bit deeper, that you have to dig out and make sense out of. The superficial ones are pretty obvious, but once in a while you get some that are really, really good,” Shores said.

Shores has spent the last 25 years clipping out puns he finds in newspapers, magazines and advertisements. His collection fills 15 binders where he keeps one or two puns per page. It may be the biggest collection of puns in the world, he said. After spotting a pun in the Source Weekly, he invited us to his home to share his collection.

“It just came upon me one day that, that I would like to share these jokes with somebody. And so, I started collecting them. And then I take a photo of them, put them on the computer and send it out to my 125 people on my list,” Shores said. “I got the reputation of being interested in puns, and people would send them to me and clip them out.”

Puns can be tricky to define, but they usually exploit similar sounding words or words with two meanings to make a joke. They’ve been around as long as people have been writing, and historians have identified puns in ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in Homer’s “Odyssey.”

John Pollack, writer of “The Pun Also Rises,” which details wordplay’s impact on human history, told National Public Radio that English is particularly friendly for puns. It’s use of vocabulary and sounds from Germanic and Latin languages leads to overlapping sounds and a larger vocabulary to play with. Old, middle and modern English all have examples on puns. In the oldest written English text, Beowulf, the titular character berates a clan called the scylding by calling them the sige-scylingia — with sige meaning both victory and sinking. William Shakespeare, the most important middle-English writer, was a prolific punner. The tradition continued into modern English, including newspapers where Shores sources most of his material from.

“If I don’t get online, I don’t find many. But I pick up newspapers and brochures and the Source and anything that’s out there in the community to grasp on to,” he said. “It’s mostly me. But my wife will come across one once in a while. And she’ll say, ‘Did you see the pun in this?’ I like to think that I’m teaching people at the same time I’m sending these out, they start looking for them and they’ll send me one.”

There is a larger pun-loving community, but Shores said it’s more focused on off-the-cuff pun creations rather than collections like his. The most famous competition is the O. Henry Museum Pun-Off World Competition in Austin, Texas. There are two categories at the pun-off, with one allowing two minutes to craft a pun on a given topic and the other a rapid-fire battle between two contestants.

“They’ll invite people who are known punners to compete against each other,” Shores said. “I would love to either attend one — I don’t think I’m good enough to participate, but I have dabbled in trying. I see a headline, and I say, ‘Well, I would’ve said it this way.'”

There’s no end in sight for Shores, and he plans to keep adding to his collection as long as he can. One day he hopes to give his collection to a nephew who’s interested in language and humor — recently penning an academic dissertation on Japanese humor.

“He’s expressed an interest in my collection. He’s somebody that’s in education, he’s into humor, and so when you’re talking puns, you’re talking humor, this is fun to see a different slant to words. So, I think he may end up with this,” Shores said.

The pun collection is just one of many hobbies Shores has. He also collects postcards, shot glasses, stamps, sheet music and 3-D wooden puzzles.

Editor’s note: In what appears to be a shameless attempt to get his article added to Shores’ collection, the writer of this article, Jack Harvel, conveniently found a way to include a pun in the story’s headline. He’s well known for punny headlines such as this around the Source Weekly.

This article appears in Mar 1, 2023 – Mar 13, 2024.