The profound pun

All men who possess at once active, fancy, imagination, and a philosophical spirit, are prone to punning.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have often thought it odd that puns are usually regarded as one of the lowest forms of humor, on a par with a pie in the face, yet persons with the keenest minds seem to be best at punning. This is what the poet Coleridge concluded. Puns, or at least the best puns, are usually the work of those with "fancy, imagination and a philosophical spirit." Someone like Coleridge himself, in fact.

Coleridge and his friend, essayist Charles Lamb, "shared a passion for punning, not just as a fireside diversion but as a model for the way the imaginative mind works." So writes journalist and author James Geary in his essay in the book This Idea Is Brilliant.

One would not expect to find a discussion of punning in a science book, but the idea Geary proposes as one worth more attention in the world of science is bisociation. Arthur Koestler once describe bisociation as "two strands of thought tied together by an acoustic knot." It is seeing two things that seem to have no connection, then finding a connection between them.

Geary says this is what Issac Newton did in the proverbial story of him in a garden observing an apple fall from a tree and discovering insights into gravity. Writers do this all the time. (I do it myself in some of my best work.) Artists do it. Economists do it. And of course, anyone does who makes an original pun.

Geary concludes his brief essay in this way: "Bisociation is a form of improvised, recombinant intelligence that integrates knowledge and experience, fuses divided worlds, and links the like with the unlike -- a model and a metaphor for the process of discovery itself. The pun is at once the most profound and the most pedestrian example of bisociation at work."