Humor: sudden, inexplicable whim or notion. The quality of being laughable or comical; drollery; farcicality; jocularity; ludicrousness; ridiculousness; wittiness; zaniness.

Someone once said, “laughter is the best medicine…” I don’t know what affliction they were referencing but it does seem to do a world of wonder for a great many things. Setting aside the major traumas and losses because of their scale in the emotional landscape, laughter serves as a healing salve for the minor bumps and bruises of daily living. When time drags on ever so slowly toward 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon a choice word can elicit a smile, and in an extreme “perfect storm” of word-play the expulsion of an afternoon liquid from out the nose. Sometimes it causes an opthalo-manic condition, the rolling of one’s eyes, or a self-inflicted battery, the slapping of one’s forehead. In any case the release of endorphins can only help our individual “humors.”

Anyone can create a “pun.” It takes no special talent or gift, and it requires no special intellect. It merely requires an intimate knowledge of the meaning of regular words, with a dash of the rebel in one. It requires the rebel to carry out the “pun” by pushing the staid and lock-step rules of grammar and definitions to their limits, and then to cross the border into the land of imagination.

Many words have different and multiple meanings, but are pronounced the same. Some that sound the same have different spellings. On the surface these lend a seeming complexity to word-play, but it is in this complexity that surprise lurks, thus the “sudden, inexplicable whim or notion.”

The puns that make up the body of this book run the range: some are “just okay,” others “pretty good,” and still others “genius and belly-laughable.” There are also some that are “pretty oblique,” and are the fruits of a mind so bent and askew that it in itself is a pun because “I just don’t mind it…”

My grandchildren once again lent their artwork to illustrate specific puns that said something to them. I appreciate their support of these volumes with their creativity.

~ Gordon H. Nagai ~ Eugene, OR   Summer 2014