AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT PREPOSITION

Everyone talks about how important it is to have a sense of humor, but who knows what a sense of humor really is? What is funny to one person may draw a perfect blank from another. My father referred to the newspaper comics as "funny papers" or "educational section" depending on his mood. My mother could see nothing funny or educational in them. My father was addicted to verbal tricks of humor though he was anything but skilled with words. My mother, who was a stickler for correct grammar and pronunciation, didn't recognize a pun when she heard one. Yet both parents were noted for their fun-loving natures and enjoyed many types of jokes in common.

Aeons ago, I was persuaded to write my master's dissertation on humor because my major professor, USC's Frank Baxter with whom I had taken a course in the English humorists, explained to me that it had to be a serious endeavor and he doubted I could get serious about anything but humor. Although this was not strictly true, I followed his suggestion and spent the next year boning up on theories and techniques of the comic.

Soon, I was classifying jokes instead of laughing at them. By this time, I had discovered through experience that we also laugh when we are frustrated. Again and again, I found myself laughing because so many things that struck me as funny were too elusive to classify.

I learned, as well, that we laugh when we see others frustrated or put down -- out of sympathy or a feeling of superiority. The number of acquaintances who laugh on seeing me frustrated or put down, I stopped counting years ago. Instead of keeping count, I simply laugh back.

But laughter does not always spring from feelings. It may come as a tickle of the intellect. Especially if the source is verbal, as in the case of the pun. Most of us, however, grew up on the adage that the pun is the lowest form of humor, and we were trained to look down our noses instead of laughing at anything that resembled a pun.

Actually, the pun is not a form of humor at all, but rather a form of wit. Moreover, it requires a certain amount of mental effort to achieve a pun. To get two ideas into a single word, it is necessary to exercise the mind. The only reason the pun came to be called the lowest form of humor is that it appears to be effortless and to depend more on sound than thought.

But try to get this across to high school students who have never bothered to question what they have been told about puns, even though they are inclined to question everything else that has validity. While working on my master's thesis, I was teaching the classics to a group of high-ranking high school students. Out of regard for my subject, I felt duty-bound to set them straight on the puns of Shakespeare and Lamb. In this I was as serious as my major professor believed me to be. But whether my efforts were successful remains in doubt to this day. Once, after launching my defense of the pun, I returned some vocabulary tests to the class and asked a student bound for law school to make a sentence using "vaunted," the only word he had missed on the test.

"I vaunted to make a better grade on my test than I did," he quipped. To my surprised delight, the class laughed instead of "booing" him.

Another bright boy, headed for medical college, had missed "paradox." When I asked if he had learned the meaning of the word, he replied soberly.

"Yes, ma'am. A paradox is a couple of doctors."

This brought down the room. I was never so proud to have done such a remarkable job of getting my lessons across.

But since that memorable morning, I have done a lot of wondering about my success in this particular endeavor. Did my students laugh because I had convinced them that puns were funny, or only because I was having to swallow the bitter pill of my own teaching?

Laughing with others is one thing. Laughing at them is an altogether different preposition.

First appeared in Aileen Lorberg's Nip and Tuck column in the Bulletin-Journal.