Books

Books : reviews

Alan Lewis.
Pundemoniam!.
Paul Watkins. 1992

rating : 4 : passes the time
review : 29 September 2007

Alan Lewis published a set of puns in the Sunday Times in the early 1970s. These, and more, are collected here, devilishly illustrated by Quanda.

Some are rather clever, like:

I tried to develop
A recipe for hyena soup
And ended up
Making myself a laughing stock

and

I feel so strongly
About loo graffiti
That I've signed
A partition

Some require some thought (or just reading out loud), like:

As an extreme Protestant
He's against merging the churches.
His motto is
No pot-pourri

Some are just groan-inducing, like:

I call her Chris Alice
'Cause I larva dearly

and some are more like tongue-twisters:

Her toy guardsman's arm
Had broken off, so I
Sold her soldier shoulder solder

(Note for USan readers: in English, "solder" is pronounced "sold-er", not "sod-er" (which sounds rude!))

Although I like the occasional pun, I probably wouldn't have bought an 80 page book of them, except that I wanted to check out the reference for the rather good Metriculation, which is one of the rather longer entries.