But despite this, Pollack digresses a lot, changing topics and following various trains of thought a bit randomly. The book is divided into five chapters, loosely organised around the pun as viewed through different disciplines (such as linguistics, neuroscience, and history), and subdivided somewhat arbitrarily by punning headers.
Pollack ends with an interesting and uplifting discussion on the nature of humour and creativity, and some fascinating insights into the evolutionary point of humour.
The author, John Pollack, has a fun and engaging writing style, and I always enjoy reading about different aspects of language - it helps remind me to appreciate the complex history, simplified (relatively) grammar, ridiculous evolution, inclusiveness, and infinite possibilities of my mother tongue.
The Pun Also Rises is a short and light read, full of fun facts about language and punnery that are not widely known (well, to me, anyway for instance, did you know that the first documented pun was a visual pun - a drawing of a woman that not all that surprisingly, when turned sideways, also looked like an erect penis). I have spent my life groaning and eye-rolling at what I considered terrible puns, and as revenge, or perhaps merely a counter-argument, my parents brought this book home, smirking as they placed it on the table in front of me.
Like so many male parental units, my dad is an avid and persistent punster - the automatic groaner that is a “dad joke” often takes the form of a pun, and my dad rarely dabbles in any other kind. How do you feel about The Pun? Do you love the irreverence it stands for? Loathe the feeble predictability of the thing? Read this book and possibly change your perspective, or at least wrestle with your ambiguous feelings toward the little nuisance while gaining some interesting insights into history, language, culture, and the mind. Or “How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics”
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