Thursday, February 12, 2009

[Insert pun here]

I have an editor friend (hello, Gary) who has a troubling propensity for inserting puns everywhere they can be inserted – and a few places they really shouldn't. Everything he touches editorially becomes lousy with kneeslappers.

But not even he, at his worst, would give a review of a new translation of Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov's 19th-century comic novel of sloth and torpitude, a title like "Sofa, So Good."

2 comments:

Zachariah Wells said...

That's such a crappy pun. I love puns, but when you have to wrench the emphasis to make it work, it's a shitty one. There's a furniture store in Vancouver with the exact same stupid name as that review. I grit my teeth every time I walk past it.

Now this is a good pun.

Anonymous said...

At the risk of posting a comment that looks AHEAD to other [TK] musings...

That's right: a couched reference.

    A very subtle and funny writer - one I've become obsessed with over the past year - in a decidedly Muriel Spark mood. Imagine The Pr...