Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

Some folks I know were talking about puns today. I’ll admit to not getting puns or at best, getting them and not finding them funny. For example, a friend of mine who is a master punster once wrote on a white board “What’s in the monitoring wells? … Hg.” I didn’t get it at all, I was thinking – well, sure they could easily be monitoring for mercury. The H.G. Wells connection just didn’t occur to me.

So, here’s my theory. As near as I can tell, puns are a confusion between the symbolic meaning(s) of a word (i.e. what the word represents) and its structural representation(s) (either verbal or written). The punster selects a structural representation that has multiple symbolic meanings. So, for example, Hg refers to both mercury and the initials of an author. One of these meanings is in-context for the issue being punned about. Other meanings for the same structural representation make sense in a different symbolic context that may or may not be relevant to the issue being punned about.

One theory of humor suggests that it is experienced when what is expected is different from what occurs. So, the confusion between symbolic and structural meanings is the unexpected that causes a pun to seem funny. It’s also the reason that I don’t generally find puns funny. For the most part, I don’t interact very well with words on a structural level. I don’t do well with crossword puzzles, K beats me in solving Wheel of Fortune puzzles 19 times out of 20. I can’t spell to save my life. In short, my interaction with words is almost entirely at the symbolic level. The specific meaning of a given word is then based on the context – the puns completely pass me by.