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    Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions
    Unavailable
    Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions
    Unavailable
    Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions
    Ebook302 pages4 hours

    Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions

    By Joe Berkowitz

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "[Away with Words] is low wit in its highest form. . . Mr. Berkowitz is sensitive throughout to the evanescence and contingency of punning and to the fleeting chemistry of a live pun-on-pun matchup crackling with energy." –Wall Street Journal

    Fast Company reporter Joe Berkowitz investigates the bizarre and hilarious world of pun competitions from the Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn to the World competition in Austin.

    When Joe Berkowitz witnessed his first Punderdome competition, it felt wrong in the best way. Something impossible seemed to be happening. The kinds of jokes we learn to repress through social conditioning were not only being aired out in public—they were being applauded. As it turned out, this monthly show was part of a subculture that’s been around in one form or another since at least the late ‘70s. Its pinnacle is the O. Henry Pun Off World Championship, an annual tournament in Austin, Texas. As someone who is terminally self-conscious, Joe was both awed and jealous of these people who confidently killed with the most maligned form of humor.

    In this immersive ride into the subversive world of pun competitions, we meet punsters weird and wonderful and Berkowitz is our tour guide. Puns may show up in life in subtle ways sometimes, but once you start thinking in puns you discover they’re everywhere. Berkowitz’s search to discover who makes them the most, and why, leads him to the professional comedian competitors on @Midnight, a TV show with a pun competition built into it, the writing staff of Bob’s Burgers, the punniest show on TV, and even a humor research conference. With his new unlikely band of punster brothers, he finally heads to Austin to compete in the World Championship. Of course, in befriending these comic misfits he also ended up learning that when you embrace puns you become a more authentic version of yourself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9780062495624
    Unavailable
    Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions
    Author

    Joe Berkowitz

    Joe Berkowitz is an editor and staff writer at Fast Company, covering entertainment and pop culture. He is the author of Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions and the coauthor, along with Josh Gondelman, of You Blew It. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two amazing cats.

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    Reviews for Away with Words

    3/5

    16 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      If you're going to read about obsessive word play competitions, I'd recommend Word Freak on Scrabble competitions instead. That's an experience. This book is reasonably well written, but once you know what competitive punning is about, there's not much more to learn. I did enjoy the discussion of the TV shows @Midnight and Bob's Burgers, where the puns were/are actually funny. But what this mainly demonstrates, over and over, is that generating puns in high quantity in short time does not lead to anything all that interesting.
    • 4/5
      I really love this kind of microhistory (I think that might be the correct genre?). Basically I love learning about tiny niche hobby communities and the people who inhabit them. And this is the nichest of the niche -- who even knew pun competitions existed? I certainly didn't, despite having lived for several years apparently just a short distance from one of the main sites of such competitions in Brooklyn, NY. And there's another site in Milwaukee? I repeat, who knew?

      When I get a chance, I will sit down and rewrite this review to contain a suitable number of puns. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at being punny on the fly.
    • 3/5
      Some people like puns. Some people hate puns. And some people absolutely LOVE them. AWAY WITH WORDS is about the third group.Last fall, my daughter and daughter-in-law gave my husband a game called Punderdome. Two words are drawn from a deck and the players have a short time to think of puns utilizing those words. The winners are those who come up with the best ones. Our pun party was very lively and a lot of fun. Punderdome is also the name for a Brooklyn-based pun competition, one of several such gatherings in the US. Jay Berkowitz is an active participant. AWAY WITH WORDS tells how the competitions are formed, how they operate, and how people prepare to compete in them. It’s a lot more intense than most people would expect.The participants get to know each other because of their frequent interaction. Many of the punsters work as writers for tv shows, movies, or newspapers or comedians. Some newspapers thrive on utilizing puns in their headlines and stories. At the competitions, a category is announced and the contestants have ninety seconds to come up with as many puns as they can. They then present them to live audiences and are judged by the audience’s response.The latter half of the book has many examples of winning (and some not so funny) entries. Since there is so much overlap among the competition and the competitors, the book does become repetitious
    • 4/5
      Waterboarding the English languagePuns are bottomless. Comedian Steve Allen used to collect the so-called best and publish them in books, but he knew he could never have the definitive collection, because they just kept coming. At the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, the best and the brightest vied to outdo each other, for about ten years. Given a word, they had to employ it in a sentence. From this came such deathless utterances as: We wish you a meretricious and a happy new year. Now, there is a small non-chain of pun events all over the USA, where people pay to be tortured by contestants who fly in from around the world. It’s the new millennium.Away With Words follows the punning of a cadre of New Yorkers on this non-circuit. They work out locally, and make the road trip to Austin where the oldest US event is their World Series of punning. The book reads like a television reality show. It progresses chronologically, episode after episode, has the same setbacks and euphoric moments, the same angst and second-guessing, and culminates in Oz. It is mostly background, mostly detail, mostly description, with several bouts of thick action interspersed. You get to know the contestants, possibly more than you wanted to, just like reality tv, and you get to read endless puns. Two things about the puns. Because these are performance contests, they are intense personal efforts, not simply tossed off, unexpected witticisms in conversation. Sometimes they are too intense. Be prepared to read a pun and not get it. (A lot of it has to do with delivery and timing, and books are not the best medium for that.) Sometimes the contestants actually have to explain the pun to the judges or the audience, which is a real buzz-kill. The other thing is what Joe Berkowitz correctly calls pun fatigue. Twenty puns in a row on the same topic can be, can I say – punishing.Berkowitz learns the ins and outs, eventually moving up a notch in the hierarchy of winners. He has entered a tiny universe unknown to most mortals, and like its television equivalents, this show is an education in how this microuniverse works, warts and all. The bottom line appears to be that standup comics or people who use mental dexterity in what they do and how they live make for naturally performing punsters. They are more observant, and quicker with associations. They have honed attitudes and timing that can lift a bad pun into a shriek of laughter. So it’s not necessarily something just anyone can take up and succeed with. Fortunately.David Wineberg
    • 3/5
      At the end of the author's year-long exploration of puns and competitive punning, he felt somewhat let down and was ready for a break from wordplay. I kept asking myself why anyone would ever feel anything but let down after spending a year working at pun-making. It's supposed to be fun!