The lesser of two weevils

A fun piece by Joseph Tartakovsky in the New York Times about that most groaned-over humor genre, the pun.

Surveying how the great comic writers have viewed puns, he notes that “Jane Austen puns once, in ‘Mansfield Park,’ and it serves to impeach the moral character of the offender.”  I might add that O’Brian’s Captain Aubrey is an inveterate punster, and his habit mainly serves to illustrate that though generally good-humored, the Captain has a stunted sense of humor.  (The title pun is his.  I’ll find others when I have the novels in front of me.)

Also, needless to say, we here at the Junior Ganymede concur with Tartovsky’s selection of the greatest humor writer of the 20th century.