Puns: a beautiful amalgamation of the language it derives from, and that situation that comes forth. -- Anon Guest
Of all the atrocities committed by the English, I give you one that has passed into the levels of international crime, yet has also passed almost unnoticed by the law. I give you - the pun.
Words are plastic. Meaning is malleable. One word can sound enough like another to make the actual joke hit like a missile. It is a form of cruel and unusual punishment metered out by those smart enough to create them, to those smart enough to understand them. The kind of joke where the punchline is not greeted with laughter, but with moans of pain.
Only Humans could come up with a style of humour specifically centred on the mental anguish it could deliver. One reliant, specifically, on the easy confusion between words. Further, some puns only work best when they are read in text format, and cannot be communicated verbally. This is simply because the words sound so alike that they cannot be a pun in an audio-only environment. Yet, Humanity did not stop there.
Enter - the visual pun. Once allowed to crossbreed with memetic humour, there were no limits. Ease of use of graphical manipulation programs only made creating them easier. This in a world where a specific arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines can evoke anger and the meaning 'loss' at the same time. Where a cartoon dog sitting in the middle of a house fire is 'fine'. Entire stories can be evoked with these nouveaux hieroglyphics. Most of them make the reader mad.
As to why it is deemed funny to make the receivers of a joke angry... The answer lies in the anger that is created. There are many types of fury known to the Human mind. There's destructive anger, which -of course- results in its sufferer destroying things, not always physical things, but destruction occurs nonetheless. There is also intellectual anger, in which the sufferer is mad about things on a conceptual level, but none comes out as physical violence.
It is quite the phenomenon, and unpredictable in its occurrence.
Just be wary when you travel into Human space. If you encounter a culture that professes to love language and education - they will mangle language and infuse linguistic acrobatics into every conversation they can. Fortunately there is a clear 'tell' for those unable to find such data on the infonets. Places with abundant Humans of a more cerebral bent are less likely to clean their public areas often.
Thusly, the pun-ishment fits the grime.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / nmonckton1]
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