大象传媒

Comedy writer Jack Bernhardt describes puns as little nuggets of comedy genius.聽 Comedy, he says, is often about taking two disparate things which are barely linked and finding parallels between them. 聽Jack performs a piece specially written for the Verb exploring perhaps one of the world鈥檚 best punsters, James Bond. 聽聽

Sam Leith is Literary Editor of the Spectator.聽 Sam says puns disrupt an ordinary way of looking at language.聽 They create a kind of wormhole between one part of the vocabulary and another, and that鈥檚 why they鈥檙e useful for more than just being funny. Puns he says are fundamental to what makes poetry work. 聽Sam鈥檚 book 鈥極ur Times in Rhymes: Being a Prosodical Chronicle of Our Damnable Age鈥� is published by Square Peg.聽聽

Artist and composer, Hannah Catherine Jones says 鈥渆very performance I do, every artwork, every title is a pun.鈥� 聽Her alter ego 鈥楩oxy Moron鈥� is the embodiment of the pun, which she explores to reveal the relationship between language and action. 聽Her first recognition of the power of the pun was aged just three. 聽Hannah performs - unusually for her - an untitled piece, composed for The Verb. 聽

Poet and performer, Nasser Hussain鈥檚 collection 鈥淪KY WRI TEI NGS鈥� (Coach House Books) are poems made entirely from the three letter Airport codes we all know from our boarding passes. The pun, he says, is 鈥渢he engine of change in language, you can鈥檛 slip from one idea to another is meaning is fixed. 聽I live in that kind of space where you can stack up meanings and references on top of each other.鈥� 聽