DIANE MAKAR MURPHY When words collide, it's just for the pun of it

"I was worried about my receding hairline so I made a deal with the devil," said Gary Hallock of Austin, Texas. "He promised that if I ever go bald, he'll make it grow back. So now I have adopted a devil-make-hair attitude, even though I know that some time there'll be hell toupee."
Presumably, most -- if not all -- of you just groaned.
You see, Youngstown and Warren are conspicuously missing from the subscriber list of the Pun American Newsletter, which selected the above as one of the World's Seven Worst Puns for the past year. Other Ohio subscribers hail from Cleveland, Elyria, Dayton, Maple Heights, Ashtabula, Toledo, Chesterfield, Avon, Euclid, Sandusky and Rocky River, among other Ohio cities. Should we be ashamed or proud? Hmmm.
The newsletter came across my desk and, being a pun-hater -- definition: one who would rather get no birthday card than one that comes with "Hogs and Quiches" I thought I should be magnanimous enough to publicize it. So, here we go.
Newsletter is born
"Three of us started it," said co-founder Bob Aitchison, who started spinning bad puns just outside Chicago. Aitchison is the retired chief executive officer of Fensholt Advertising, a Chicago agency, and had also worked at Advertising Age magazine and Industrial Engineering Magazine.
Leonard Cobey and Lila Bondy are the other punsters. Cobey is a retired clothier with a journalism degree, and Bondy is a retired speech therapist and teacher. Why would such otherwise respectable people devote themselves to puns?
"You know how businessmen meet for lunch at their favorite restaurant?" Aitchison asked. "My partner and I would pun back and forth, sometimes to the displeasure of others. After a couple of years ..."
(OK, wait a minute. A couple of years?! Was there anyone left in the restaurant after a couple of years of "People who live in glass houses shouldn't steal thrones" and "Beware of geeks bearing grifts"?)
Anyway, "After a couple of years, my partner said, 'We should start a club,'" Aitchison said. They did, in 1986, the Pun American Club. Less than three years later, they started the newsletter, ponying up $100 each.
Subscribers
The quarterly newsletter now has 1,200 subscribers (again, none live in Youngstown/Warren), to include subscribers in each of the states as well as Sweden, France, Israel, Zimbabwe and Australia. Zimbabwe?!
Each issue is solidly packed with four pages of puns like:
"The midget said it is better to have loved a short girl than never to have loved a tall."
"The doctor fell in the well and broke his collarbone. Doctors should tend the sick and leave the well alone."
"Lament of the long-suffering wife: 'Some mornings I wake up grouchy. Other mornings I let him sleep.'"
Subscribers regularly contribute for, as the newsletter states, "the glory of being published and the fact that your name will be known to punsters wordwide." That would include being known to punsters in Zimbabwe, of course.
Now, should you love a good pun, you will undoubtedly want to subscribe to the address below by sending $11.95 for six quarterly issues. "Why a year and a half? It is too much work to send out renewal notices every year," Aitchison explains in the newsletter.
Intelligent punsters
And should you want to subscribe, you will want to know that, my comments notwithstanding, history has known some very intelligent punsters, such as George Bernard Shaw: "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
To subscribe, send $11.95 to Pun American Newsletter; 1165 Elmwood Place; Deerfield, Ill. 60015. You can e-mail Aitchison at PANEWS@aol.com. And remember, "When the cannibal wiped his mouth daintily, he said, 'My wife makes great soup, but I'll miss her.'"
murphy@vindy.com