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Featured Business Review: Best Puns – Taking Puns Seriously
  by:  |  Jan 5, 2011
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Last updated on September 8th, 2017 at 12:53 am

One of the more important comedy-ties we have in life is laughter. Poet e.e. cummings once said “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” And there is none so determined not to waste another day quite like David R. Yale, author of Pun Enchanted Evenings: A Treasury of Wit, Wisdom, Chuckles, and Belly Laughs for Language Lovers.

This excursion into punning began quite early for David, a self-proclaimed pundit of double entendres. When he was very little, he relates, “my Dad told me he was going to ask his boss for a raise in pay. I just couldn’t understand why he wanted his salary in raisins!”

His first true introduction to pun jokes came at age 8, when an uncle and inspired him to make up his own funny stuff. It wasn’t until college, however, that he learned that telling puns is actually a deformity:

“I’ll put it in plain English so you’ll quickly get the gist.

Others were born with a funny bone, but I have a humor wrist!”

Now David knows that puns can elicit groans as well as laughter (some may argue that the ratio is more skewed towards groans, even) but being able to appreciate a good pun keeps minds healthy. According to an exploratory study reported in Sighcology Today by Anna Littikl, pun lovers are 90% less likely to incur Alzheimer’s Disease because they constantly think about words and develop more connections between neurons. Simply put, puns can get people laughing and thinking at the same time!

These are the reasons why David wants to spread the power of punning to people everywhere. His goal for Pun Enchanted Evenings is to bring fun and laughter to pun, riddle, and language lovers throughout the English-speaking world. As much as he would like to extend beyond that, the fact that their subject matter is predominantly language-based means that the intention will likely change when it is translated.

Besides, there are still a lot of English-speakers to reach with gems like “What would you call a positive outlook on middle age? Forty-tude!” and “Why must you use a pencil to draw a level line? Because if you use a pen, you get an ink line!” and David is always coming up with new puns daily, even if he doesn’t know how he makes them up.

Though he may not know where his puns come from, David keeps pads and pens everywhere so he can write them down when the puns pop in unannounced (as they’re wont to do). After scribbling the puns down, he often consults a thesaurus and a dictionary to refine them. The biggest challenge, he says, is that “The best puns don’t give away any words in the set-up,” otherwise they will be too easy to guess.

Nobody likes a joke where one can easily tell what the punch line is as early as the set-up, after all. David’s own idol, Anne Ohnimous certainly didn’t make any predictable puns. David gushes about Ms. Ohnimous, saying “That woman is amazing. She’s written more puns than every other pundit combined, and she seems to be immortal!”

Now David might not be immortal, but he’s doing his best to produce as many puns as his hero. These days David is on his way to write a second volume of word plays which he may call The Pun Also Rises.

On the more serious side of things, he’s also planning to pen a book on direct mail marketing creative strategies which will be founded on articles he’s written and his 27 years of experience in the field.

As if David needed more motivation to continue his work, Pun Enchanted Evenings was chosen as a second prize for the prestigious Washington Post Invitational, which shows that while success comes in small steps, if you continue taking them, you’ll eventually land a big one.

Adding even more ink-couragement to David’s zeal is UPrinting. David has had book promotion postcards, book cover posters, and business cards ordered from UPrinting. He says his working relationship with UPrinting began because no one had the perfect business card template for them, until UPrinting came along.

He adds “With great promotional pieces from UPrinting, we hope to flood the market with a title wave of new pun books!”

Avid pun lovers may have to wait a while for the next books but they can tide themselves over chuckling at the 746 original word plays in the first book. Or they can go to David’s site to join the 2010 Best Puns in the World Contest where winners will be published in the anthology of the same name. Either way, it’s time to get ready for the punniest word plays around!

 

About the Author

Arthur Piccio Author Bio Art manages The Art of Small Business. When not passive-aggressively chucking UPrinting’s own high-quality business cards and custom yard signs
at his coworkers, he enjoys…y’know. Other stuff.
 


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