I struggled to come up with a response, but saved myself at the last second with a crude pun on Fokker, the defunct Dutch aircraft maker. 'That was so plane to see,' McClughan said, grinning.

'W-R-I-G-H-T - I hope I pick the Wright Flying Machine.'Ī sudden cheer swept the audience. 'It's gotta be a puh-un.' In his Texas drawl, pun was almost a two-syllable word. 'Wait, wait.' It was the judge, holding up his hand. 'I hope I come up with the Wright Flying Machine,' I said. My mind flashed to all the aircraft hanging from the rafters back at The Henry Ford museum. 'If a helicopter had babies,' McClughan asked, 'would it be a baby Huey?' It took me a moment to get it - a clever reference to both the cartoon duck and the workhorse chopper of Vietnam. And why not? He was a seasoned champion, and I was just some no-name walk-on from Michigan. He looked so relaxed just standing there at the microphone, his shirt untucked, smiling at the crowd. 'George, why don't you go ahead and start,' the judge said. The judge read McClughan's slip aloud: 'Air Vehicles.' 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.

The pun also rises by john pollack