The Scottish writer Ali Smith is surely the most pun-besotted of contemporary novelists, edging out even Thomas Pynchon. There’s a reason that the most abundant writer in the language was so abundant in puns: words, like Bottom’s dream, are bottomless.
Being accidental, they are like free money-nature’s charity. Puns are part of the careless abundance of creation, the delicious surplus of life, and, therefore, fundamentally joyful. On the other hand, everyone secretly loves a pun, and, wonderfully, the worst are often as funny as the best, as the great punster Nabokov knew, because the genre is so democratically debased. They lurk, pallidly hibernating, inside fortune cookies and Christmas crackers the groan is the pun’s appropriate unit of appreciation. Puns are accidental echoes, random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos. They are essentially found, not made discovered after the fact rather than intended before it. If you are tired of puns, are you tired of life? Puns are easy to disdain. Words aren’t stable in Smith’s fiction: as in Shakespeare, everything is mutable.
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