Purging a Pun

[steepholm]

"Unter den Linden? How sublime!"

For years I've nursed that multilingual pun, looking for an opportunity to slip it naturally into conversation. "I wonder what Longinus would have made of the Brandenburg Gate?" I might say, a propos of nothing - only to see the other people in the bus queue shuffle warily away. Would anyone feed me a line that would allow me to unsheathe my devastating witticism? Would they heck. It became an albatross round my neck. An albatross called Moby Dick.

Today, in a fit of abandon, I put it up as my Facebook status - but it didn't get so much as a single Like. After that I was forced to face the fact that a) not many people would get the joke, and b) even those that did probably wouldn't find it funny.

Perhaps, in fact, it isn't very funny. There - I've said it.

I admit defeat. Take it. Do with it as you will. Publish it as your own, and make millions - I care not.

God, I feel so much better for that.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think it was Roger Angell who once wrote a piece about a man so hapless at witty party conversation that he laboriously constructed what he pathetically thought was a brilliant bon mot and then saved it up for years, waiting for someone to bring up the possibly unlikely topic of Angela Thirkell in conversation, so that he could then say, "Well, I think Angela Thirkell is a thquare." Bah-dump.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I was beginning to feel like a New Yorker short story. Better to be shot of the thing.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, that made me laugh! I love Thirkell, and she was one, by the standards of the 1960s.