The reason competitive punning exists

You can’t take away humanity’s urge to play with language. Also, book news!

“Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.” - Edgar Allan Poe

The most obviously interesting thing about me is the fact that I am a competitive punner.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a lot of other cool things (business owner, fiction author, rescue dog mom). But when I first meet a person at a happy hour or something, they’ll usually nod politely until I tell them about the puns—then their eyes light up. That’s when they want to know everything. They might even buy me a glass of Chardonnay to keep me talking.

I mean, I’m not gonna WINE about it. It’s GRAPE.

If you had no idea before, now you know competitive punning is a thing. I host San Diego Pundemonium, a monthly comedy pun contest in San Diego, and it’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. It’s also not the only pun contest like it. There’s Punderdome in New York, It’s Always Punny in Philadelphia, Full Groan Comedy in Dallas, TX, Bay Area Pun-Off, and The Punderground in Spokane, WA, to name a few.

The Super Bowl of pun events, though, is the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, TX, which I just returned from competing in last month. San Diego Pundemonium’s format is based on it. O. Henry, which has been running for nearly 50 years, is literally the world championship of punning, and people really do come from all over to compete. It attracts a crowd of hundreds, often over 1,000 people each year, who come to watch 32 competitors in two categories: Punniest of Show and Punslingers.

In Punniest of Show (which we call Battle of the Pundits in San Diego), contestants deliver speeches no more than two minutes long full of puns on one topic of their choosing. The winner is decided by a panel of judges, who award points based on things like presentation, being off-book, quality and quantity of puns, and audience engagement. For my Punniest of Show speech, I chose the topic of “inflatable things.” Here’s how it went.

Show this to my grandchildren.

The Punslingers category (which we call the Punger Games in San Diego) is an on-the-spot, back-and-forth pun-off, in which a series of contestants compete tournament-style, slinging puns based on a topic decided by the judges in advance but chosen at random. That’s how you end up with two dudes competing to make the most puns on the topic of “pregnancy.”

“Wow, neither of us has a uterus!”

The rules are strict. They’re sticklers about the delineation between true puns and non-puns, which are cliches or references (i.e. on the topic of farming: “This place is a pigsty” would not count, but “I’m aTRACTORed to you” would). The judges make calls that get boos from the audience. There are crowd and competitor favorites (I had the honor of being named Most Viable Punner in 2024).

But the best part of O. Henry–and the best part of San Diego Pundemonium, too–is the people it attracts. Competitive punners are weird, funny, well-read, and partial to New York Times crossword puzzles. Many of them are professional actors or comedians, but many are not. The people who win at O. Henry tend to be the ones who have competed before. But sometimes, first-time competitors like my husband advance all the way to second place.

I like to say I’m married to the #2 punner in all of America.

Why humans pun

One of the running jokes at O. Henry is asking people how they got into competitive punning by opening with, “what’s your villain origin story?”

I posed this question to a few people who came with me and my husband to watch the bats emerge from under the Congress Avenue Bridge during the O. Henry after-party. One answer that stuck with me is a competitor who told me about being on a tour as a child with a guide who cracked punny joke after punny joke. The tour guide then unapologetically declared their love for puns by stating, “puns are just playing with language.”

Just kind of WINGING it with this video.

That clicked for me too, and made me understand a little bit more about myself. People who share my supremely silly hobby aren’t superhuman. Like all humans, we enjoy playing with language. We’re just slightly less afraid of looking cringey in the process.

People have probably punned for as long as language has existed. The first documented “bar” joke is most likely a 4,000-year-old pun that didn’t survive translation from Sumerian. One of my favorites in Spanish involves a punchline in which a police officer, encountering a drunk guy pooping outside, says “Como?!”, which translates to both a disbelieving “What/how?” and “I eat?” Then, of course, the drunk guy says “Sure, eat as much as you want.” Puns aren’t just in “lowbrow” jokes either. Shakespeare notoriously loved puns, and a lot of the lines in his comedies are way raunchier when delivered in Elizabethan English.

To me, that last point proves why pun competitions exist. As spoken and written language evolves, new puns emerge from new pronunciations, names, slang terms, idioms, and grammar conventions. It’s incredibly subjective, and therefore that much more fun to do in a group of people who enjoy it too, in front of an audience that revels in clever wordplay. People are trying to figure out how to build AI agents that can recognize and respond to the patterns driving humor and puns, but the process is…pretty humorless, TBH.

Even though I am well aware of all the ways AI will take away parts of my day job livelihood and force me to adapt in ways I can’t even conceive of yet, it’s comforting to know that this very silly thing I love to do is also very uniquely human. LLMs operate on predicting patterns to generate language according to a prompt. Events like Pundemonium and O. Henry are all about doing unpredictable things with language, which continues to constantly evolve.

This is why I competitively pun, teach workshops that bridge punning skills with other performance skills, and work enough punny business names into my fiction to put the Bob’s Burgers writer’s room to shame. On that note…

Book updates!

It’s officially less than three weeks until the launch of my debut novel Be Well on June 23. LESS. THAN. THREE WEEKS.

Forgotten what my book looks like? Got you COVERED.

I’ve been pretty busy in book promotion land. Someday, I might even write a non-fiction book about what it’s like to be your own book publicist when PR is your day job.

But today, I want to make sure everyone sees the shiny new updates to my author website, made in tandem with my amazing web designer.

1. A continuously updated list of every podcast interview, Q&A, and article I’ve done about writing/my book on my media page. I just added some really fun Q&As I did for the amazing Anna Rollins and Melanie Jennings’ Substacks along with other cool articles, with more to come later this month.

2. A beautifully laid out events page showing where I’ll be on my upcoming book tour for Be Well. This will also be continuously updated as I add more book events!

If you want more book news–and, naturally, more puns–you can follow me on Instagram and TikTok (where I mostly like to post puns), and maybe give San Diego Pundemonium a follow too. Come see one of our shows if you’re local. I may have some Be Well swag for you.