PUNS AND PUNSTERS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 235, 22 February 1913, Page 1 (Supplement)

PUNS AND PUNSTERS

HUMOR DERIVED FROM MEN'S NAMES.

To be born with a pun-provoking name is to carry through life a heritage of petty misery. Even the staid records of the law courts bear evidence to this fact. There was Ulrich Egg, for example, a German, until recently in the restaurant business in New York City. lie appealed to the Supreme Court to relieve him of his patronymic, and suffer him to take the less suggestive name of Eck. Of course, the newspaper reporters chaffed him on the fact that his name had grown stale. He was used to ridicule, and bore their chaff meekly. He told how his friends had kept hammering away at him, one day asking him if he were scrambled and the next day if he were an omelet. Delightful as these jokes were at the first hearing, they speedily lost their freshness.

So in Hartford, Connecticut, Henry Ratz was allowed to change his name to Raites. He also had his tale of woe. His neighbors thought it was just too tunny to speak of him and his wife as the old rats and their children as the little rats. Some of them even coiamitted the enormity of calling the latter mice. Picture the sorrows of a German immigrant who bore with him to New York the name of Julius Jackus. Harmless, even honorable, as the name may have been in the Fatherland, it became a burden of shame when American pronounciation (assisted by American humor) transmogrified it into Jackass.

Again, take the case of Justice Day, afterwards Sir John Day. That terror to English criminals lived himself in continual terror of the punsters. All possible changes "were rung upon his name. In Liverpool he was "Judgment Day"; in South Kensington, where he was married, he was "Wedding Day"; in the Western Circuit he was "Day of Reckoning"; in a London court where he had once nodded on the bench, overcome by temporary fatigue, he was "'Day of Rest." And when he received his baronetcy the jokesmiths did not lose the opportunity of saying, that Day had been turned into Knight. It was of an Irish Judge of the same name that Lord Plunket made a jest that survives in the anthologies, "if a cause Were tried before Day," said Plunket, "it would be tried in the dark." Of course this joke was revived and repointed against Sir John. Rear-Admiral Stephens B. Luce is credited with quite as good a joke upon his own name. As a young man he was extremely popular with the smart set at Newport. On the same ship with him was a stern disciplinarian, even on the look-out for some derelitcion of duty. One evening Luce, after a round of pleasure, met this marfcinot, who remarked, sharply:

"Mr. Luce, you're tight." "Pardon me. sir," was the quick retort, "if Stephen B. Luce, how can he be tight?" Joseph Knight, long editor of the English Notes and Queries, was another famous punster. Meeting Rider Haggard just after the publication of "Jes," he at once adapted the lines in "Othello":

If I do prove him haggard, Though that his jesses were my dear heartstrings, I'd whistle him off.

Lord Erskine rather prettily combined pun with compliment in a epigram lie forwarded to Lady Payne in answer to her vicarious enquiries as to his health: 'This true I am ill; but I need net complain, For he never knew pleasure who never knew Payne.

James Payn, the novelist, cheerfully records that one of the best puns he had ever heard was made upon his own name. When Sir Leslie Stephen and another famous climber he had attempted to scale some Alpine height, but had given up midway and found refuge in a roadway hotel while the others went on with their climb. Sir Leslie, condoling with his friend before leaving him, quoted the Shakepearean line: The labor we delight in physics pain.