Pun

a play upon the meanings of the same word or sound. The intent is to raise a laugh by exciting a sense of the ludicrous. Thus an absent husband who sends his wife no money may be said to give proof of an unremitting affection. In "The parson told the sexton, and the sexton toll'd the bell," the descent from the pathetic to the ludicrous is rapid.

The pun is not considered a high form of wit, nor is it suited to serious discourse, nevertheless it is used by standard writers. The first act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is full of puns. Lowell says of Shakespeare that he "sometimes allows his characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in carving some cherry-stone of a quibble," adding, "In a pun our pleasure arises from a gap in the logical nexus, too wide for the reason, but which the ear can bridge in an instant as, 'Is that your own hare, or a wig?'"

Holmes, himself fond of introducing a pun, defines a pun in effect as a trick of mental optics, "throwing the shadows of two objects so that one overlies the other." "A pun," says he, "is an insult to the person you are talking with," yet in the same passage he ventures to connect the killing of a man by a blow and the killing of a word by a pun with manslaughter and man's laughter. See Conundrum

"Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh, but ye schall make less stir than my Lord of Leicester."--Queen Elizabeth.

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