‘If you make fun of language, you’re actually making fun of how seriously we take ourselves’

The pun according to Wisse

‘The pun that started it all is this: Kurt Cobain Marie’, says Wisse Beets (38), maker and creator of the weekly pun in de Volkskrant. ‘I was solving a cryptogram with friends and there was something about melting au bain-marie. In one way or another we thought it was incredibly funny to connect that tough guy to a kitchen technique with chocolate.’ After that, making puns for cryptograms became a game that the friends enjoyed more than the original puzzle, where they weren’t very good at all.

When they had about five jokes, Beets thought it was time for the word graphic to exist. He put together some word jokes and approached newspapers. Bee de Volkskrant it hit. Beets has now been sending a new word graphic to the newspaper every Friday for five years. On Monday, his puzzle is on the back of the V section. These puzzles are now bundled in the Phrasebook‘a colorful and crazy book full of my puzzles, illustrations by Merel Corduwener, languages ​​​​and new puzzle finds’.

Puzzles in newspapers have a long tradition. ‘Almost all newspapers have puzzles, which is quite strange because of the dull image of puzzles,’ says Beets. Yet he can also give reasons why a newspaper is a good place for puzzles. ‘By making a puzzle you enter into a different kind of relationship with the newspaper that is on the table in front of you. You can do something yourself.’

Moreover, according to Beets, puzzles contrast nicely with the news. ‘Puzzles are well-arranged and have a logical and unambiguous answer, which is published in the same newspaper a week later. A stark contrast to the questions of life.’ It is precisely this contradiction that stands out in the history of newspaper puzzles: during the First World War, newspapers first started placing puzzles and in the Second World War they became really popular. The New York Times did not participate for a long time, but the newspaper went around after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. ‘Puzzling was seen as a form of flat entertainment. The more miserable the news got, the more that picture tilted.’

Beets also sees newspaper puzzles as an opportunity to playfully deal with the news. His puns often refer to current events. In the cryptic descriptions sometimes subtle and sometimes outspoken opinions appear. An example: ‘A spiritual holiday full of self-examination and yoga from the Prime Minister to recover from all the hiding from his responsibilities.’ The answer: Rutteraite. ‘This makes it clear that Rutte deserves a holiday after the umpteenth sacrifice of everyone but himself’, says Beets.

Some critical puns in the Phrasebook show that puzzle language can be political language, such as compote theory (“the idea of ​​conspiracy fruit puree”) and Bolscenario (“film script about ‘Jair the president’ is unfortunately not fiction”). The question is what does that accomplish. Does it make the puzzler think or does it flatten important matters by making a joke of it?

Beets wants the puzzler to think about those kinds of questions. For the book, he therefore asked comedian Micha Wertheim and writer Sylvia Witteman to reflect on ‘the word joke’. Where Wertheim wrote an ode to the pun, Witteman wrote a roast on paper. Beets: ‘Some people consider puns the lowest form of humour, others see it as primal humour. It is interesting to contrast those perspectives and to think about the language of puns.’

Beets acknowledges that puns are often lame, but like Wertheim sees that as strength. ‘In the podcast of De Kleine Komedie I heard Wertheim say that word jokes attack the language. When you make fun of language, you’re actually making fun of how seriously we take ourselves.’

With the Phrasebook Beets hopes to make people look at words differently. What he likes most about his puns is that they connect two unexpected worlds, namely the serious puzzle world and the humor. ‘You should never laugh with a cryptogram, here quite occasionally. The book is therefore also a way to have a pleasant time together. I hear from my friends that they make my word jokes together in a whatsapp group.’

Sylvia Witteman about ‘a nasty game’

I still remember my first conscious, painful confrontation with the phenomenon of ‘pun intended’. The culprit was my grandmother. I sat at her table and we ate broad beans. She picked one broad bean from among the others and placed it on the edge of her plate. “Look,” she said with a mischievous smile. ‘Napoleon!’ I looked at her questioningly. “Bean apart!” she yelled. ‘A play on words. Nice right?’

It started to crackle and spark in my head. Nice? Nothing fun! Here language, that sacred means of transport of the human mind, was misused for a ghastly game. Bonaparte, bean separately; that was not fun, that was ‘terrible’, a term coined by Kees van Kooten, also a play on words, so wrong, wrong, wrong, although the flag did cover the load.

Soon it dawned on me: the world was full of those reprehensible puns. Even my beloved comic books were forgiven for it. My parents once talked about an “idea fixe” (we were in the overly psychologized 1970s) and I exclaimed in surprise, “Hey, that’s the name of Asterix’s dog.”

My parents laughed, of course. Did they know much? I picked up the albums to prove my point. Now my parents laughed even harder. “Look,” they said. “All names are puns.” They explained to me what an asterisk was, an obelisk and an idea fixe.

Their French was not very good, so they did not get to the explanation of ‘Assurancetourix’ and ‘Abraracourcix’. I only heard it years later, from a niece who was studying French. In the new translation, the chief and the bard are called ‘Heroix’ and ‘Kakafonix’ respectively, which sounds a lot crazier, but is easier to pronounce. (I only understood the meaning of the name of the village ‘Babaorum’ a few years ago, when I saw a ‘baba au rhum’ in the window of a French baker.)

The rest of the world does like puns, given the overwhelming amount in the streets. A ‘Nootzaak’, a ‘Pablo’s IJscobar’, a poffertjes stall ‘Pofferdory’, the vegetable stall ‘All you need is lof’, snack bar ‘Fritureluur’ or ‘Hans z’n Frietje’ and a cement truck with ‘C’est le beton qui fait la musique’ on it.

All so annoying! And then all those funny headlines in the genre ‘KLM in a dive’, pffffff… (although, if such a headline is funny by accident, it is of course fun, because by accident (also Kees van Kooten)). ‘Pope on inactive’, for example, is genius and ‘Dead 2-year-old girl gnaws at Chinese people’ is certainly a good idea. As long as it’s not intentional, eh? And unfortunately that is all too often the case.

So I explained to my children at a very young age: puns are a kind of belching and farting. You have to let them go once in a while, there’s nothing you can do about that, but try to do it in such a way that it doesn’t bother someone else. So preferably do it on your own, in an otherwise empty room, on the toilet or on the balcony.

But yes, you know how children are. They burp and fart out loud (otherwise it’s ‘sin’), and so do their puns. We recently found a coot with chicks on the bank of a stream. “Ah look,” said my daughter. ‘Multi calves’. “No,” my eldest son replied. ‘Less cows’. My youngest son opened his mouth, but I put my fingers in my ears and ran away.

That’s not life, is it? I feel so lonely among all those people who do like puns. I am a bean apart.

Language often gets in the way of Micha Wertheim

Until well after puberty, I thought that puberty meant the time you need to go through puberty: puberty. The period you use as a young adult to confront the fact that the world does not seem to resemble the world as it was presented to us as a child.

For me, that time should be over by now, but I still find it difficult to accept that when it comes to puberty, no one realizes that it is actually about pubertytime should go.

I have never shared the view that language helps us to understand the world better. Language just gets in the way. A blackbird who whistles is not mistaken, a dancer who moves beautifully does not have to explain what is meant. But a person who tries to put something into words gets stuck before the first sentence has left his lips.

That I chose a profession in which language is important heavily against the advice of my teachers stems not from my love of language, but from my struggle with it. You can read this text because the word processor and an editor have worked hard to make my thoughts readable. As a certified dyslexic, I don’t see language as a ball you can play elegantly with, but as an opponent.

Fortunately, there are many times when I misread something. Like that time the aside that my mother had bought at the station, came out big with a cover that said every modern woman should have a maid. When I read the article it turned out to be work stress. Something for those highly educated aside-readers could be helped by taking a maid, but the women’s magazine apparently did not want to be burned by such practical solutions. Another time I picked up a flyer for ‘circus fear of failure’. I was really looking forward to all the acrobats who didn’t dare. Unfortunately, on closer inspection it turned out not to be a circus, but a course.

Comedians are always a little condescending about puns. And if they don’t do it themselves, the reviewers are there to say that such humor is very easy. I personally think otherwise. If language is a shell that surrounds reality, then puns are a way to peel off a piece of that shell. So that we are briefly reminded of how clumsy that shell is, and can catch a glimpse of what lies behind that shell.

Just as slapstick reminds us that we humans will always lose to gravity, puns teach us that we’ve lost before we’ve even opened our mouths.

The comedian who stumbles over his shoes or words seems to fall, but in that trap is a moment of weightlessness. That’s what art is all about, to take one word that seldom covers the load.

The WordGraptograms are therefore nothing less than a circus weightlessness.