I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to write a play in which every line of dialog contains at least one pun. I don’t mean that the characters would deliberately be punning. In fact, they’d have no idea any of this is happening. Rather, as they play out their scenes, controversies, resolutions, shifts in power and allegiance, they would just happen to say things in puns.<\/p>\n
The audience would experience such a play on two completely different levels. The pun or puns contained in each line of dialog would be a sort of music dancing around the lyrics of the play. One could imagine dialog along these lines:<\/p>\n
\n…
\nCharacter 1: I never thought you’d hatch such a bold scheme.
\nCharacter 2: Yes, I’ve decided to come out of my shell.
\nCharacter 1: I’m so glad. You’ve always been a good egg.
\n…\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nYou get the idea. I suspect the above example is too brazen — you’d need to be more subtle about it. If it’s done right, the resulting play might be very satisfying, or it might be unbearably awful. Many members of the audience might not even realize that there was a second “pun” labor to the proceedings.<\/p>\n
It’s impossible to say at this point just how such a mad scheme would come across. But it would certainly be interesting to try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to write a play in which every line of dialog contains at least one pun. I don’t mean that the characters would deliberately be punning. In fact, they’d have no idea any of this is happening. Rather, as they play out their scenes, controversies, resolutions, shifts in … Continue reading “Pun play”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4001"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4001"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4005,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4001\/revisions\/4005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}