Prepping for a Pun Parody Party
What keeps me up at night is not Ebola, ISIS, or how Target is killing Thanksgiving. At the moment, I am more concerned about getting ready for an end-of-the-year Pun Parody Party with a group of media executives in New York City who, I understand, are largely English majors. Having been blessed with a similar background, I know the market value of placing one word after the other, as certain as if I was writing with my feet.
Just because the PPP is for charity doesn’t mean it’s not serious and participants won’t be judged. On the contrary, given the fact that representatives from Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ will be on the Congo Lion and in the judging stands means I had better ace this triple-P affair. At times like this, when my future seems uncertain and my will in check, I never fail to remember my late mother’s advice to “keep my pecker up,” always adding a proviso for sensitive ears that my Mum — and the entire British tribe — are actually referring to chins, not peckers. Still, no matter how many times I have tried to keep my chin up, using all sorts of isometric tricks, I fail my dear Mum’s memory and think of something else. As a last resort, I fall back on a ditty she sang when doing laundry, something about “knees up Mother Brown.” I can see clearly now the pain has gone.
The PPP affair, now in its fifteenth year, comes with pages of rules that prohibit certain themes, memes, and Deens, Paula that is. The organizers want no Ebola, KKK, or Ted Cruz parody costumes. The thematic advice is straightforward: “Find a pun, a saying, a bromide, or some utterance by that annoying Thanksgiving uncle, parody it with remorseless wit and dress the part, taking care not to offend, commend, or pretend.”
There was more of this English major gobbledygook but I got the idea. Anyway, if I wanted to get a fuller taste of this sinful syntax, I would spend time hunting turkeys where I could receive these cries on a platter without all those mashed potatoes. This would be the time to talk about the guy who ate so much of the Thanksgiving bird he quit cold turkey. Did you hear the one about the guy who forgot how to throw a boomerang but it came back to him?
We now know why punning and all his loose cousins are considered the lowest form of wit. I resolved to move slightly up the language tree, searching for more complexity and intellectual weight, knowing my judges in that Times Square ballroom would applaud my game plan.
Instead of trying to recall what some daft uncle said on some deft occasion, I did what any warm-bloodied American male would do. I went back to Mum for direction and advice. My mother was a treasure trove of expressions, mainly of British origin, with “Mum’s the word” leading the pack. This was her way of saying her three sons should never reveal anything to our father, even if he took the belt out.
Since that expression carried too much psychological baggage, I decided to move closer to the hearth and my mother’s sewing box. She spoke to me again as she had a thousand times: “A stitch in time saves nine.” Since she often uttered this phrase while sewing or knitting, I knew I was in the right ballpark. Only years later after getting a PhD in English did I learn the difference between an idiomatic expression and a literal one. Mother, God rest her soul, was repeating advice that had been around since at least since 1732; take care of that hole in your pants now before it becomes a chasm. Much later, I realized my dear Mum was also speaking symbolically: I should get off my butt and do something with my life.
I am grateful for my mother’s tutorial but felt that any movement into parody might defame her memory. How would I keep Mum intact while meeting the requirements of PPP’s demanding Board? On second thought, I realized I could be a little snarky and even a bit off-the-wall, as mother often behaved this way appealing to her various constituencies. And she, having lived in the Cockney area of London, loved rhyming slang, the way the bad guys confused the cops. She was on board. Or, as Mother would say, I’m in for a penny, in for a pound.
With help from a thesaurus, my beer-drinking friends, and at least one transplanted Cockney, I agreed that my wife and I, in deference to the largest observed population in NYC, should dress as rats, all the while mindful that we are in a diverse city and should behave accordingly. The Cockney fingered his beads and found the luscious word “snitch,” adding bite and street cred to my mother’s stitch.
The rest was easy. Through the beer haze appeared the rest of the phrase: “A Snitch in Rhyme Pays Fine,” suggesting a “snitch” is to poetry what an English major is to petty crime. How could a gathering of English majors be displeased with this outcome? In this phrase, I hear echoes of Iago’s “He who steals my purse steals trash” as well as a century of Hallmark doggerel. A snitch or vermin, out of its rat hole, who dabbles in sophomoric, rhyming poetry should be fined and expelled from the Community of Letters.
To take some of the sting out of the parade, our rat costumes will have a touch of Disney and won’t frighten the impressionable child. But the language on the tunics will remain severe. We haven’t decided who will carry “A Snitch in Rhyme/Pays Fine,” broken into neat chunks of metadata, on his or her particular chest. We reserve the right to take words by the scruff of the neck and rearrange them in new and interesting ways no matter what the assembled elite may think. Grammar is not for the faint of heart.
Nothing is written in stone. Up to now our snitch will be simply paying a fine for his presumptuous poetics and awful syntax. But if we consider his actions more of a crime, outside the dictates of a high-toned party, there will be consequences not covered in the Book of Rules. Just because we prepping for a party doesn’t mean it should be all fun and games.
