The Lowest Form of Humor?

I'm heading to the Yale Writer's Conference this weekend, where I'll be joining a bevy of fellow authors in a humor workshop.

Of course we've all been emailing in advance, figuring out where we'll meet, and what we'll do, and how long it will be until we can drink, and of course it led ME to respond the only way I know how:

Terrible puns. Specifically, in this case, on kindred spirits vs. drinking spirits, but there have been a lot of emails, and therefore, a lot of terrible punning.

In one of the first classes I took in college, "Wit & Humor," we read Freud's book The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (as you might have guessed, it was a laugh-RIOT). In a series of profoundly unfunny--and often super-bigoted--examples, Freud laid out his theory of humor: what causes us to experience something as humor, what it means about our desires for our parents, you know, the usual Freud stuff.

I know the first thing I think of when I hear "Sigmund Freud" is "laugh factory"

Tucked away among his many blanket pronouncements on a form he was clearly incapable of producing, Freud ranked different forms of humor. Wordplay, I believe, was considered the "highest" form of wit.

Punning was considered the "lowest."

Which always confused me, because I would think of punning as a sort of wordplay-subset, the squares within the larger category of wordplay rectangles, so to speak (i.e., all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares).

Either way, I took umbrage. I did and do LOVE puns. Especially bad puns. The kind where you groan first, and MAYBE laugh second. Maybe.

I know I'm not alone in this. Nabokov was indisputably one of the best English-language writers in the last hundred years, and just as indisputably a pun-lover. According to my Nabokov professor, an especial favorite was delivered when a nun, attending one of his lectures, was offended by some back-row hanky-panky between a pair of students.

Dreaming up his next sweet-slash-lame burn...

"Sir," she fumed, approaching the lectern. "How could you carry on your lecture when those two young students were...spooning there?"

"Be grateful, madam," he said, ever the gentleman, "that they weren't forking."

Please tell me I'm not the only one who unabashedly loves punning. I've always thought they add flavor to otherwise dull conversations (but then I'm often in poor taste...).