Educationally, puns are more than just some antics

What to say to a hitch-hiker with just one leg? Hop in.

Research suggests that the critical ingredient for a chuckle is to be able to interpret a situation in two different ways, both of which make some sort of sense.  That’s the trick to puns of course, which are often unjustly regarded as the lowest form of humour.  In fact, puns are educationally quite interesting. The study of puns has a long and venerable history; among the many who spoke about them at length were the ancient orators, who tended to Babylon.

The reason puns are interesting is not because they may have some mild, dubious relation to subjects at school.  If you need to teach the geography of the Middle East with How did I escape Iraq? Iran or to teach French with I asked the Frenchman if he played video games.  He said wii then something has gone seriously wrong with pedagogy.

The link is actually a little deeper than that, and comes down to the fact that the root of puns is seeing things in different ways; and it is being able to hold alternative explanations in mind simultaneously that gives such a tickle.  Put like that, the haha moment is not so different to the aha! moment that teachers always describe as the highlight of their working lives.   

More profoundly, figuring out the meaning of puns has a great deal in common with making and testing hypotheses about what works – that is, with the scientific method.  That process of looking at data and seeking patterns is what scientists do, and the importance of such a mindset was outlined in 1890 in a science magazine entitled the Method of  Multiple Working Hypotheses by Thomas Chamberlain, a prominent geologist (available here).   He argued that entertaining several interpretations of any given set of data is essential for science.  Uncertainty fuels curiosity and propels science forward; and in general ambiguity is a driving force of human progress.

But it’s not just science that seems to have links to humour.  I went to a lecture the other day on humour and the Arts.  The session started well, with a friendly clown holding the doors open for visitors – it was a nice jester.  I learnt that according to the Encyclopedia of Creativity “ humour and creativity share similar cognitive behavioural and emotional processes….   Creativity requires flexible examination of the connections among ideas and humour depends on the selection and evaluation of different association at different levels of analysis.”  Put like that, humour doesn’t sound very funny.  But it does sound like exactly the sort of thinking that we want to see in our students. That’s why we ran a punning competition here at school over the last few weeks with some very significant prizes.  I made ten entries myself, hoping one would win – but no pun in ten did.  

I am convinced that the multiple perspectives aspect of puns makes them a rich source for educators.  But that’s not to say puns are for everyone –  it’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs, for example – they always take things literally.