The Power of Wordplay
Conjure up an image of animals chasing each other in a park, athletes clashing on a field, teenagers teasing and flirting at a mall, or improv actors discovering their lines as they speak them.
Each is a form of play. Each is a joyful activity that occurs not for a “rational” purpose but to take delight in living. Play is a pervasive—and essential—part of the experience of all animals. When we play, as when we dream, we release thoughts and emotions that otherwise get suppressed. We also explore. We engage in a game of trial and error to discover how the world works.
Ironically, play requires rules. Think of kids playing ad-hoc street games like “Capture the Flag” or “Kick the Can.” Before the games, they earnestly set ground rules. After setting the rules, they can play with abandon. Or think of kids playing make-believe. When one plays out of character, others get upset: “You’re not supposed to do it that way.” To enter the special “space” of play, we need special rules and procedures.
Now think of the playful things writers do with words. Think of the jazzlike improv of Will Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Herman Melville or James Joyce. Think of the quips of Gertrude Stein or Mae West or the clever puns of a Marx Brothers movie. Here’s Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers:
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That’s not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time. As I say, we tried to remove the tusks. But they were embedded so firmly we couldn’t budge them. Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.
No one was punnier than Shakespeare. Hamlet calls his uncle Claudius, who murdered his father and married his mother, “a little more than kin, and less than kind.” Claudius, irritated at Hamlet’s mourning, asks: “How is it that the clouds still hang over you?” Hamlet responds: “Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.” Later, someone asks about Polonius, who has been murdered. Hamlet responds that he is at supper—“not where he eats, but where he is eaten.”
In Romeo and Juliet, after a jokester named Mercutio is accidentally stabbed, he cannot resist one last quip before he dies: “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.” Shakespeare’s work is filled with sexual puns, including the last word in the title Much Ado About Nothing, which refers to the female genitalia.
Wordplay requires the reader to do more work. Readers need to think through the puns and the twists, the odd couplings and the irregular sounds.
When you master wordplay, magic happens. With the right rhythm and cadence, words send readers’ imaginations into unpredictable spins of delight. Writing does more than simply communicate. It changes thinking and feeling.
Wordplay begins with rhythm. Life moves in rhythm, from the turning of seasons to the tides of the ocean, from the rhymes of a poem to the movements of a dance. Ancient literature, like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, took the form of verse. In an oral tradition, without written records, storytellers used a distinctive meter, melody, wordplay, and imagery to remember the lines of the epic tales.
Too much wordplay, though, taxes readers’ patience. So mix your wordplay with simple language. Put on a display of linguistic pyrotechnics, then back off and give your reader a chance to absorb the fireworks.
