Pun Valley Serenade, Now with Extra Wildebeest

Sometime ago, over on Twitter (yes, it’s my first #FromTwitter post!), @FuseEight posted this:

I responded with:

Now, that’s an old pun. I read it in a kids joke book years ago and it’s been hanging around in my head since then. I had enough characters leftover in my tweet to credit it to “traditional” but I thought doing so would diminish the joke. But posting it without credit and leaving the implied possibility that this was my own creation left me feeling icky. So, I did what any other masochist would do, I gave myself a penance: write enough original Chattanooga Choo Choo puns to prove I could have written that one. So, I followed up immediately with:

That felt better. Nougat is great. “Chew-Chews” is charming albeit a bit obvious. So, I pushed it further. This one comes in the form of a fable:

Wait for it…

So, at this point, I’m actually feeling well enough to let it go and a wiser head (@SteveJankousky) gently suggests some prudent bud nipping is in order. Betsy, however, senses there’s yet untapped potential in the phrase.

So I follow with:

You’ll notice a large break between Chatty Newt and Crabby Nudist. Believe it or not, I spent a good portion of those three hours wondering if this next variation was something I wanted to post. It came to me before Crabby Nudist, in fact, but I sat on it for a bit. Here it is:

See, the opening line to Chattanooga Choo Choo is “Pardon me, boy” and I know that “boy” is incredibly loaded. It’s a problematic term, obviously, but in the song, it refers specifically to Pullman Porters. In the late 1800s, George Pullman, head of the Pullman Palace Car Company, hired Black men (and only Black men) to be porters, the stewards of his luxury railway cars. Most of these men were recruited from former slave states in the South and I believe the job was a coveted one. It was a proud position. Being a Pullman Porter gave these men a rare opportunity for employment (and travel). Despite that, the fact that their professional position was called “boy” proves some pretty heavy racism followed them into their new positions.

I wondered if replacing “boy” with “Roy” was disrespectful to the history of Pullman Porters, then I wondered if one can ever reclaim problematic histories with humor (not that this one is mine to reclaim), then I wondered if there’s a measure by which one can (a trauma versus humor graph) and then I finally wondered if I wasn’t just overthinking the whole thing. In the end, I posted it but I felt like the tweet needed an asterisk. So here I am, seventeen months later, adding it.

With your permission, let’s move on.

The next one is the worst of the batch. It requires a very specific type of pop culture knowledge (newspaper comic strips from the 80s) and a very specific cultural experience (cutting out newspaper features and sticking them with magnet to fridges). It piggybacks off the previous pun (reintroducing Roy and newspapers for no good reason) but messes up the premise—why am I rewarding the paper thieving Roy by giving him solid gold fridge magnets?

You could argue that in gags like this, you can reach a saturation point where the stupider the joke, the funnier it becomes (see Norm MacDonald’s Moth joke). But in this case I don’t think it’s dumb enough to be called a good dumb joke. It’s just clumsy. I regret few things in my life but I regret Cathy Nuggets. It did, however, give inspiration for the next pun which might be one of my favorites:

“Soy” felt okay to me, maybe because it’s so far removed from the original, and I really like Catatonic Tofu. I felt this was as good a place as any to wrap it up but not long after logging off, I had one final idea. The next morning, I posted it:

Before I give you that last pun, let’s reflect. What lesson or lessons have we learned today? Well, besides that I’ll take any opportunity to pun it up (the title of this post itself is in reference to the movie that introduced Chattanooga Choo Choo, SUN VALLEY SERENADE), and that I’ll take any opportunity to interrogate a single word’s meaning six ways from Sunday, there’s this: the best part of these jokes, for me, is the set up. Yes, there’s a lot of satisfaction in finding the right alliteration and rhyme to make the pun work but for me the true joy is in the journey. I like the premise that there’s a dating scene for frogs, that there’s a bunch of naked people having their picnic thwarted not by ants or wasps but by a nearby field of blooming flowers, and that there’s a vet somewhere in my neighborhood who sees castrating African megafauna as a routine procedure.

A common piece of advice given to people writing in rhyme is that the rhyme must serve the story (we can talk about whether or not I agree with this in a separate post). I think the same should be said of humor in general and wordplay in particular. So there you go. Today’s lesson: give your puns porpoise.

I wasn’t sure how to end this post. I wanted to write one last Chattanooga pun that would drive the message home but none sprung to mind. I might have had more time to come up with something, but I spent a large part of this weekend at a synagogue with a close Jewish friend. It was lovely but as I observed the services, I was surprised to see in attendance a large number of worshippers who had only recently converted to Judaism. I had expected the congregants to be long-time members and I whispered as much to my friend. Little did I know the rabbi was standing right behind us! I was mortified. But the rabbi smiled kindly and motioned for me to come closer. I leaned in and heard him say, “Pardon me, Goy. Shabbat is now a time for new Jews.”

I’ll be here all week.