ABSTRACT
Mary Douglas once remarked to this writer that in England only aristocrats and working-class people enjoyed puns; everyone else thought they were a debased form of humour – a verbal habit that displayed the suggestively labelled solecism of poor taste. Her perspective was entirely consistent with her theories of purity and danger (Douglas, [1966] 2002), inasmuch as it suggested the risks attendant, for a bourgeois sensibility, of anything that would destabilise semantic certainty. Puns almost invariably – because conventionally – elicit groans of protest. The more ingenious they are, the louder the groans. Puns are deliberate exercises in disorder, a threat to the functionalist view that language exists to convey precise, literal meanings. Just as holiness and dirt, in Douglas’s scheme, both lie outside a structure that must reassert its boundaries against both in order to persist, aristocratic puns and working-class wordplay both threaten the semantic (and, by extension, the social) security of those for whom the precise use of language is a serious and humourless business.
