John Pollack

Transcription

JOHN POLLACK: Thank you all for having me. I'm a big fan of Google. I use your products every day-- seven days a week. I love the Ngram Viewer. As a researcher, it's tremendous. So is there anybody here who worked on that? All right, well, whoever, among your colleagues, did fantastic. So I just want to say that I don't take what you do for granted. I mean, I think if you grow up at a certain age, pre-Google, pre-web, you take research a little bit for granted. And so I got started as a reporter 25 years ago at the Hartford Courant. And you had to track everyone down by telephone. And so you'd call somebody and they'd tell you, no, I'm not the person. You need to talk to so and so. And you'd find that number. It was a process of looking up numbers in phone books. And we used to, in the bureau where I worked in New Britain, Connecticut-- I covered the sewer commission, among other things-- we had all these phone books so you could track down people, and even out of date phone books because people would de-list their numbers because they didn't want to get called by reporters. And so phone books were our best friends. And I did this story once on phone books and the history of the Yellow Pages. Do you know why the Yellow Pages are yellow? Well, as it turns out, in 1883, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, there was a printer and he was printing up something new called the phone book, the phone directory, and he ran out of white paper. And rather than wait for the next train, he said, I'll just print it on what I have, which was yellow. And it caught on and we have the Yellow Pages. And so ever since, we've let our fingers do the walking. Except now, thanks to you, we do it on a computer using Google. So apart from the Ngram Viewer, which I love, there's a couple other features that really appeal to me. And one is Google Doodles. And there's one on the back wall, and there. I see them all the time. I love Google Doodles because we live in this era where the corporate brand police at most companies guard their logos like Fort Knox. And Google plays with it constantly. And in the process, is asks the viewer to make sense of it, to pull out the meaning, to search. And I love how the use of the logo engages people in the very product that you sell, which is the ability to search for meaning. The second feature that I love is the autofill. So on the autofill function, I'm typing one letter. I haven't even decided what I'm searching for exactly, and it starts guessing ahead. And I think it's like a game. Sometimes I stop to check to see if it was before I do what's happening. And the ability to intuit an answer from incomplete or conflicting information is exactly what we do as people when we listen to people and when we talk to people. As I'm speaking now, the research shows that you're accepting these sound waves and processing them and trying to guess ahead how I'm going to finish the word, how I'm going to finish the sentence, what I mean. And even if you have to double back at the end because you guessed wrong, it's worth it from a biological standpoint, because it speeds up conversation and human exchange. So this happens to be the crux of punning, too, at its core-- trying to decide, based on conflicting information or incomplete information, incomplete context, what does somebody mean? And so who knew that Google was a punning organization intrinsically? So that's what I love when I get to work on Google. So what is a pun? Any definitions from the audience? Anybody want to hazard a guess? Yes. AUDIENCE: Using words in a way that could be interpreted two different ways. JOHN POLLACK: Exactly. Now, that's the core definition. That's what I use. They come in a lot of different forms. That's the beautiful thing about punning, is that as soon as you try and define it, somebody can come up with one that is slightly different. But you hit the nail on the head. And so what do the people in this room think about puns? I take it it's a self-selecting audience, right? Raise your hands if you like puns. Let's have a show of hands. All right, anybody? There's one person with their hand down, but OK. Fair enough. In general, in society, what's the take on puns? Anybody? AUDIENCE: Lowest form of humor. JOHN POLLACK: Lowest form of humor. Anybody else? AUDIENCE: People groan. JOHN POLLACK: Groan, juvenile, you name it, the pun gets kicked around. And the truth of the matter is that, for most of human history, the pun was a sign of intelligence, of wit, of insight, of wisdom. And it wasn't always intended as humorous. It was just a way of encoding more meaning in fewer words. But in the last 400 years or so, it had this fall from grace. And so what I want to talk about today is how it fell from grace, why we're living in a pun Renaissance today, because the pun is making a huge come back, and then I want to share with you how the pun enabled the rise of modern civilization. Now, you laugh. I'm serious about this. And by the end of it, I think you'll come away with a new appreciation of an art form that you all practice every day. So let's start out by taking a look at when puns were at their apex in English, roughly 400 years ago. English as a language was in major flux. In the couple centuries earlier, in the 1300s, the plague had come to England and it had killed off a third of the population-- a million people. And that just drove major disruption. And people started fleeing their villages. So you started to have a mixing of regional accents and a mixing of regional dialects. And English was already a real mutt of a language. I mean, the Romans had brought Latin, you had Celtic grammar, you had Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The Vikings had invaded. They gave us words like knot and haggle. Good words. Who knew they were Viking? And then you had the Norman invasion. And then you had 10,000 French words come into English-- decolletage, debonair, double entendre-- good one. And so English was a swirl. And what happened was in the age of Shakespeare, in the late 1500s, early 1600s, puns were just hugely popular. Lawyers punned, judges punned in their judgments, the playwrights were punning, the poets were punning. Even condemned criminals would pun on the gallows to show that, hey, I'm not so low. I still have eloquence, I still have wit, I am a worthy human being. And so puns were in power then. So what happened? How did we go from puns at their apex, extremely popular, to puns being kicked to the curb as low humor, juvenile, lowest form of wit? OK. There were several factors. The first was the arrival of the printing press. So technology can always disrupt. The first printing press came to England in 1476. And what happens when you print something? You have to choose a spelling. And when you choose a spelling, you favor a meaning. So as you shift from an oral culture to a print culture, suddenly some of the wind is lost from the sails of punning because punning thrives on ambiguity. And that's why I always feel that spoken puns are better than written puns because they preserve the surprise a little bit longer. A second factor was the rise of the turnpike system in England. As better road spidered out from London, the accents, which had been kind of a mix of all these regional accents, gave way to kind of the cultural dominance of London. And so the London accent became the norm, the standard by which others were judged. And so you started to suck out some of the diversity in the language and differences in pronunciations that fueled puns. And then the next thing that happened was coffee. Now, you think, what does coffee have to do with punning? In 1632, I believe it was, the first coffee house came to London. And this was pre-tea-- England before tea. And so these coffee houses became a great mixing pot of social classes, and a lot of fierce debate, and different ideas clashing. And they were great sources of punning. And if you look at the big names of the day, you had Nicholas Rowe, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift-- all these famous writers all going back and forth at each other every day in the coffee shops. But a funny thing happened was that in this mixing of classes, the aristocrats realized that, hey, they weren't that much smarter than the average Joe when it came to punning. And some of the social status that had been associated with punning was suddenly called into question, because, well, hey, if everyone can pun, it must not be that great a mark of distinction. And so class became a factor. The other thing that happened was that people like Sir Issac Newton started gathering, and scientists started talking. And this was the birth of the Enlightenment. And so there was a rise in the importance of reason-- of scientific law, of logic. Puns are very unruly by their nature. They jump fences of meaning, they don't seemed to belong to order. They're very subversive. And so as the Enlightenment took root, the status of puns fell. They were suspect. And so what playwrights had been using to hold attention, to undermine the royal censors through double meanings started to fall in status. And so the pun started its slide down. And then along came Samuel Johnson. Does anybody know Samuel Johnson? OK. Yeah. He wrote the first real English Dictionary. And the thing was is that English had sort of been a second-tier language. But when he wrote the dictionary, it was an attempt to kind of put English on the map, to fix meanings. And he started out in the late 1740s. To do this, he raised money for the project as a startup, and he locked himself in this garret in London. You can visit it. It's a great little garret to visit. And he thought he'd done in two years or so. Two years became three, three years became four. He ran out of money. There are bars on the windows above the door there because people were trying to break in to steal stuff to collect their debts from him. That's how bad it got. And after nine years of slaving away in this garret, in 1755, he came out with the dictionary. And it made him a celebrity. He was a rock star of the age. And, of course, if you spent nine years going crazy and going broke writing a dictionary, what do you dislike most? Double, triple meanings. So he hated puns-- hate them. And he used his bully pulpit to denigrate them. In fact, he later came out with a collected works of Shakespeare, and he started taking out the puns. And he said, Shakespeare would-- I'm paraphrasing-- Shakespeare would be pretty good if he weren't so willing to sacrifice everything for a pun. And, of course, Johnson did a great service to English by writing the dictionary, but he did a great disservice by dissing puns. But even he couldn't resist a good one. So there's a great story. I was researching the book and came across this-- in the rare book room at the public library on 42nd Street-- there was this little leather-bound volume of collected puns from 1826. And I was flipping through it. And I came across the story about Samuel Johnson punning. And I thought, that bastard, I've got him. And so here's the story. He's walking through London one day with Boswell, his assistant and later biographer, and they're passing Old Bailey, the courts. And there's a crowd gathering. And he says, Boswell, go find out what's happening. So Boswell comes back and says, there's going to be a hanging. He says, we'll, find out who it is. So he goes and it turns out that the guy being hung-- the condemned man's name is Mr. Vowel. And Johnson turns to Boswell and says, Bosie, well, it's very clear that it's neither you nor I. See, clearly, he had no problem with capital punishment. So, listen. Despite Johnson's effort, the pun survived, and England is a very pun-rich culture. But here in America, even as the English were kind of rejecting it, we were saying we were embracing it. And the early colonial preachers punned from the pulpit, here, to keep people engaged. And, in fact, if you do an image search, you'll find great punning sign boards across America today in that same tradition. So one I loved was God answers knee-mail. K-N-E-E. God answer an knee-mail. There was another one-- the sun cures sinburn. And you'll appreciate this one. It's not a pun, but it says, there are some questions Google can't answer. Anyway. You might doubt that. So the early political leaders of this country, too, were big punsters. And I was doing some research and came across a great letter from Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams at the Constitutional Convention in 1789. And I'll get the exact quote, but he basically said, listen, you wouldn't believe all the punning that's going on here. And he said, the people at large view every object only as it may furnish puns in bon mot. And I pronounce that a good punster would disarm the whole nation where they ever disposed to revolt. So the great orators, the great statesman, the great writers of the era, they were punning too. And it was happening on all levels. So out on the frontier in the 1830s, Davy Crockett was a big punster and a bragger. And he was a celebrity in his day, even before he died at the Alamo. And there was a riddle going around in the early 1830s-- how many years does Davy Crockett have? Any guesses? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. JOHN POLLACK: Three-- a left ear, a right ear, and a wild frontier. So what happened? So how did we go from puns being popular to low status? Well, in the early 20th century, all the Jewish comedians on Vaudeville celebrated the pun-- Henny Youngman, the Marx Brothers, George Burns, Gracie Allen. Punning was a big thing. And then after World War II, there was a shift in humor just as there was a shift in music. As jazz became less structured, as art became more abstract, humor migrated away from set piece jokes and into more the Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce free-flowing dysfunctional narrative sort of humor. And puns were left high and dry, as old fashioned. And you still got smart punning in some pop culture. Think of "MASH" and Hawkeye Pierce-- Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce. Just brilliant punning back and forth, back and forth, again, for purposes of subversion. But in general, the pun was on the decline. And that's when you had the groans set in. So just a question here. What does the groan mean? Anybody? AUDIENCE: It means you got the joke. AUDIENCE: Yeah, it means you get it, but you kind of want to pretend you don't like it. JOHN POLLACK: Exactly. Or, it could mean, I didn't get it, but I don't want to admit it. Or it could mean it was brilliant, but I don't want to encourage you. Or it could mean I thought it was awful. Or it could mean that your brain is toggling between so many different emotions so quickly that that's what comes out because you just don't know what to say. And so the groan as a cultural reflex is a post-war cultural reflex, just as the rim shot set in there too. Badump-bump. Now, originally that came out of Vaudeville, and it was an affirmation that, hey, good job, good joke. Nice work. And then after, it was associated with, oh, that was cheesy. So I don't want you to think, though, that the idea that puns are cheesy or low or juvenile or unpopular is true, because that's actually not the case. Because let's look at the marketplace. Puns sell. Who can think of some punning product names? OK. Let's just-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. JOHN POLLACK: What's that? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. It was a toilet bowl cleaner. JOHN POLLACK: OK, great. What about Cherry Garcia, flavored ice cream, or Carmel Sutra-- the whole Ben and Jerry's line. How about the name of your company, based on a pun. How about-- let's see. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. JOHN POLLACK: Yeah. Or Verizon. The name Verizon is a portmanteau of very true and horizon, true horizon. Try getting reception-- not always true. What about when you get your iPhone, there's a little booklet that comes with it called "Fingertips." And if Apple's doing puns, that's not very Apple-like, but they can't resist, because it's cool. So who here eats Chipotle ever? Anybody ever eat at Chipotle? OK, so a couple years ago, they had this brilliant campaign, and it was celebrating their, I think, 17th anniversary or something like that. And they were celebrating the quality of their ingredients. And to do so, they were wrapping their burritos in gold foil. And their campaign was ausome-- A-U-S-O-M-E-- from the gold in the periodic table. And it speaks to the intelligence of both the people on the selling end, but the intelligence and expectation of intelligence on the receiving end as well. All the movies. Think about "Gnomeo and Juliet" or "Ratatouille." Did anybody see "Ratatouille," about the rat, the chef in Paris? I mean, it's brilliant. And so the reason why people pun in these situations is that puns sell. There was this Dutch study that showed that consumers preferred slogans that included puns-- the more meanings the better-- even when they completely imagined that there was a pun. So there didn't even have to be a pun, and they liked that better. Think about the way that puns creep into our language. Did anybody here have branch last weekend? Some people probably did. Branch-- breakfast and lunch. Smog-- smoke and fog. Medicare, Obamacare. Look at all the tabloid newspapers. The headlines each day here in New York-- the Post and the Daily News go at it trying to out-pun each other. Because puns sell. Now, why is this? Well, part of the reason is that we're so bombarded with information all day every day-- ads projected on the sidewalk, blinking lights, laser beams popping-- everyone's trying to get our attention, saying, hey, look at me, hey, look at me. And part of the challenge is just capturing people's attention. And puns are sticky, because they pack more meaning into fewer words, and so they're very sticky. And that's why puns work so well. Now. I don't want you to think that puns are just light, because they're not. In the course of the book, I interviewed an anthropologist about the significance of puns, and he had studied these long pun duals in Tzotzil, which is a Mayan dialect in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico. And they have these long ritual punning duals in which they go back and forth, back and forth for hours, and you lose face if you lose it. But they use these pun duals to communicate ideas that are sensitive or perhaps taboo. Like, hey, I'd like to marry your sister. And so they might seek permission through these pun duals. It's called [INAUDIBLE]-- I'm probably mispronouncing the Tzotzil. But that's the form. And again, I mentioned a few moments ago about the Shakespearean playwrights would use puns to evade the royal censors. Well today, in China, the censors are going wild trying to police all the puns because while you can control what someone says, you cannot control what someone means and what people infer. and so a good punster is the censor's worst enemy. There's a video on YouTube called "The Ballad of the Grass Mudhorse." And it's an entirely satirical punning story of a unicorn-like creature who's defeating the river crabs. But all the names of the creatures are punning references to things that are banned in China. And they're sticking a finger in the eye of censors. So if you go back to George Orwell's "1984," there's a postscript on there about newspeak, the language that the government was working on that would eliminate double meanings. And he said that it would take a while, but by 2050 it would be complete, and that if you could eliminate double meanings and only have approved words, no one could even think a subversive thought. And I think it's a testament that he thought that totalitarianism would come in 1984, but language would allude control for much, much longer than that. So punning is very powerful, even today. And we're really living in a pun Renaissance-- not just in the market. But for anybody who's interested, there's a contest called Punderdome 3000. Has anybody been to that? Yeah. A couple people. It was last night in Brooklyn. It's once a month at Little Fields. It's a great show. But there were 350 super nerds in the room punning-- not everyone was punning. But it was just electric. And we're really living in a renaissance of the pun. So we're lucky for that. So I want to talk to you briefly about one more main idea, and then I'm going to take questions. And this is getting back to what I said earlier that the pun enabled the rise of modern civilization. So how old do you think the first evidence of punning is? Any takers on that one? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. JOHN POLLACK: By a factor of 10. So about 35,000 years ago, we have our first evidence of punning. Now, how do we know that? You might say, oh, there's no recordings, there's no written language. But what we do see are these carved stone statues about the size of an Oscar. And on one side it's a naked woman, and if you rotate it 180 degrees, it's an erect phallus. And what it shows is that people have the capacity to see two ideas they were different-- they were inseparable, but different. And what you saw depended on angle that you looked at it. So we know that people had the capacity for punning 35,000 years ago. Now think of the challenges of language. So if you had, say, you were in the cave and you wanted to paint a picture that said, great buffalo hunt today. We killed three buffalo. OK, easy enough, right? You light your torch, you get your pigments, and you paint three buffalo on the wall, and you put in three spears or three arrows, and boom, you're done. OK. Great. All right. Now let's say you flash forward to ancient Mesopotamia and you want a contract because you're sending 478 sheep to Ur on Saturday for this price, and here are the payment terms. And it's a lot more complicated, and it's a lot harder to do with just pictures. I mean, pictures are great for nouns, OK for simple verbs, but for the complexity of law, for the complexity of tense, for anything subjective, it's very, very difficult. So what the scribes started doing is they needed abstractions, they needed relational words. And they had this intellectual breakthrough in both Egypt and Mesopotamia-- about the same time-- where they said, gosh, this hieroglyph, this cuneiform script, it sounds like x, or part of it sounds like x. And they'd break off that piece and they'd just harvest the phonetic value for other purposes. So, in essence, they were punning. So knock knock. AUDIENCE: Who's there? JOHN POLLACK: Isabel. AUDIENCE: Isabel who? JOHN POLLACK: Isabel necessary on a bicycle? All right. OK, so you think stupid knock-knock joke. But it's actually a very complicated intellectual process to take those phonetic chunks and re-purpose them into an entirely new context and meaning. And that's what the scribes in Egypt and Mesopotamia were doing-- not knock-knock jokes, per se, but they were using the same process of breaking apart sound, symbol, and meaning and recombining. Now, you might think, oh, who is John Pollack to assert this, and I actually went and I interviewed Richard Parkinson, who is the Head Egyptologist at the British Museum. He's also an excellent punster, by the way. And he said, oh, of course, and he started pointing out all of the puns in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And not all of them were meant as funny, but they ran throughout the hieroglyphs, and the ancient Egyptians were big time punsters on many levels. And it wasn't all about humor, it was about religion, it was about deeper meaning, it was about identity. And so if you look at the ancient hieroglyphs, as the evolved into script, you started seeing some symbol for symbol noun-like meaning, and you also saw phonetics coming into play, where symbols had strictly phonetic values. And in about 1700 BC, scribes unknown and in the sign they had this brilliant breakthrough, and they said, screw all the one for one symbology. Let's just go for a straight phonetic alphabet. And that's what they did. And they came up with the North Semitic alphabet. And that became the basis for Phoenician, for Greek, for Russian, for Persian, for Sanskrit, for the English alphabet. It was incredibly liberating, because suddenly you had this way to write down ideas of infinite complexity--- anything. You could write about anything. You didn't have to carve or paint all these complicated symbols. You could just, boom, do it really efficiently and you could transmit that information over time. So once you could transmit ideas of infinite complexity over time, you had this rapid acceleration in the accumulation of knowledge. And so suddenly the progress of civilization started taking off. So, in essence, if you had no puns, no punsters, you would have had no phonetic alphabet-- no phonetic alphabet, no practical way of writing. No practical way of writing-- no way of transmitting knowledge over time, and we wouldn't be sitting here in a tall building in New York City in a modern civilization. No puns no, modern civilization. Does that make sense? Great. So there are always going to be critics of the pun. And there are some people that will deny that the pun matters or that the pun played this catalytic role. And I would say that a lot of that's because they feel somehow threatened by the pun. Because the pun fogs up the lens of clarity through which they like to view the world and impose order, or at least the illusion of order. Because when people denigrate puns, they're denigrating one of the great creative catalysts in history. And I say this because puns really sharpen our creative thinking skills. The great thing about punning is that it takes you from topic A to topic Q very randomly sometimes, apparently. And you're making an assertion that there is a connection. And that is the essence of creativity. It's trying out new associations, it's trying to find connections between disparate topics. And I would argue that the pun is humanity's first hyperlink. Let's go from A to Q or to P-- whatever. And it's this power of association that let us go from cave to hut to castle to skyscraper to space station. It's a series of very wild and unlikely associations that accumulate over time, and this willingness to take risks that is this ability to see connections and meaning. That's what fuels human progress. And so when you think about two people banging rocks together-- somebody said, wow, that causes a spark. And then they light a fire. And then suddenly you're boiling water and generating steam. And someone says, oh, we can generate electricity, and then pretty soon we're talking on our iPhones. And all of that sweep of history, all of it, comes through these really amazing unlikely associations through human creativity. And that is one side of the coin, and punning is the other side. It's the same exact process. Now, am I arguing that punning is a substitute for reason? No. I'm not. But neither is reason a substitute for imagination. And it's the willingness to imagine that gives us a destination that we can aim at and pursue through reason. But were it not for the imagination, we'd be sunk. And in this era of great challenges, great global challenges, imagination and innovation are more important than ever. So I would just say pun with pride and remember that your wordplay is always more than semantics. Thank you. Any questions from anybody? Comments? Yes. AUDIENCE: Hi. I was reading a book by Joel Spolsky recently, and he said that there's no place for puns in software, especially user interfaces where we're trying to accommodate people who might not know your language as their first language. They might be reading it in a different language. What are your thoughts on the place of puns in software? JOHN POLLACK: Well, I confess that I fall into the category of I like to click the button yes or no. So I'm not an expert at software by any stretch. I would say that punning is very relevant meaning. And if you're writing software or writing language, you are using those as a tool to communicate. And in law, you're trying to, sometimes, eliminate the possibility for confusion, or you're trying to allow for some gray area, some wiggle room down the line, in a contractor, per se. And so I think punsters would have a great advantage in writing software, because you would be able to see the possibilities. And listen. Code is a creative process, and coding is a creative process. And so it's important to have a spirit of play and elasticity. If you didn't, it wouldn't be any fun. Because there's elegance in it. And sometimes there's elegance in a pun. So I don't know if that answers your question, but, yes. AUDIENCE: So regarding your time in Spain being the Foreign Correspondent, did you find that punning was similar in Spanish media and also in the Spanish language compared to English? And if not, then what were some of the differences in the way that they use the pun? JOHN POLLACK: With all due credit to my high school Spanish teacher, Mr. Puente, I wasn't great at Spanish when I arrived in Spain, although I had a good grasp of the grammar. I do recall that when I finally made a pun in Spanish, which was like two years down the line, I felt I am somehow achieve cultural fluency, even though it was a poor version of it. Any language, Spanish included, that has a tradition of literature-- has puns in it and tends to celebrate puns-- I couldn't comment specifically on puns in Spanish headlines, because I've been reading them for a long time, but my guess is they're there, as well, because they are throughout Spanish literature. Yes. AUDIENCE: Actually kind of a follow-up to that. Do you think that the notion of the pun being the lowest form of humor is like an American cultural thing? And have you noticed any differences around the world and how they're perceived? JOHN POLLACK: Well, certain cultures, as I mentioned, esteem punning. And, as I mentioned, in the Tzotzil speakers of the Chiapas Highlands, it's high honor. One of the interesting things that I use the Ngram viewer for, which lets you search for phrases over time in millions of books-- it actually came out after I had finished my research on "The Pun Also Rises" and I had been trying to figure out, pardon the pun, no pun intended, when did these phrases come into use? Because then you could track of the denigration of the pun, the fall from grace. And I was relieved that I was within 10 years, through old fashioned bookwork, to the Ngram viewer. But in answer to your question, I think it varies by culture, and it varies by time because puns ebb and flow in popularity. And-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] puns are unpopular [INAUDIBLE]. JOHN POLLACK: I can't comment on the popularity of puns in most of the world. I will say this. Every major language group in the world has puns in it, even Pitjantjatjara, which is a language in the Australian Outback, has puns in it. And with so many T's and J's, that's a challenge. But it's amazing. They're everywhere. So I would say that they're popular it at least in every major language family. Yes. AUDIENCE: How was Clinton at punning without his writers? He certainly plays with meaning plenty. JOHN POLLACK: Yeah. Bill Clinton is great with language. And I can say that my arrival at the White House had little impact on his speaking ability. It was great before I got there, and it's great now. I did send him a copy of "The Pun Also Rises." and he wrote me a letter back with a pun in it. And he said he was glad to see that the world pun champion had another title. So I he can hold his own. Any last questions? We've got one more, here. AUDIENCE: I'm introducing my four-year-old son to "Animaniacs"-- sort of a high point for puns in my entertainment. And he really struggles with it. And he just misses half the meaning. Do you feel that puns are unfair to those with limited language or English as a second language? Is that maybe part of the reason they're looked down upon? JOHN POLLACK: I think that puns are good for learning language. And I would say that if you look at riddles and knock-knock jokes, which are some of the earliest types of humor that kids learn, those are almost always driven by puns. In fact, like, what's black and white and read all over? The newspaper. That's been bouncing around since the middle of the 1800s. And so I would say push the puns. The puns are great. The whole idea is that I think one of the problems in our society-- and I certainly suffered from this in my early schooling-- is that apart from watching "Conjunction Junction," what's your function, grammar and language is seen as dry and inflexible instead of an incredibly elastic, playful putty with which you can do virtually anything. And so I would say puns are an important learning tool to look beyond the surface of what somebody means and what do they really mean. How do you bring in context? What analogies are triggered? And so good for you for introducing your son to that. AUDIENCE: Thank you. JOHN POLLACK: Well, if there are no more questions, I really want to thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be at Google. And I appreciate your warm welcome. And pun with pride.