The Pun Competition

It was Callum's fault, everyone agreed afterwards, although Callum himself maintained that he had merely provided an opportunity. Valentina Rojas had been in Edinburgh for ten months, studying for a master's in linguistics, and she went to the Fringe that August with her roommates the way you might go to look at the sea: to be impressed by something enormous and slightly overwhelming. The city had swollen to twice its size. Every pub, church hall, lecture hall and cupboard seemed to contain a comedian, and every street corner a juggler.

The trouble was her vowels. Valentina's English was fluent, fast and, in most respects, enviable, but Spanish had given her five vowel sounds and English seemed to require about twelve. She knew the theory perfectly; she could draw the vowel chart from memory and explain exactly where the tongue should be for ship and where it should be for sheep. In practice, when she was tired or excited, the vowels wandered off and came back wearing each other's coats.

The week before, she had told her landlord, with great sincerity, that she wanted to leave in Edinburgh forever, and he had looked so hurt that she had to explain. On a tour of Leith she had asked the guide where she could see the sheep in the harbor, and had been told, very kindly, that the ships were over there and the sheep were about forty miles away. And on the first Friday of the Fringe, after an enormous plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, she leaned back in her chair and announced to the table, "I am such a fool." Callum laughed so hard that he knocked over his drink. "You're full," he said, when he could breathe again. "You mean you're full. Although, honestly, both work."

That was when he dared her. Round the corner, in the back room of a pub called the Thistle and Crown, a show called The Pun-Off ran every night at eleven: an open competition in which members of the public took turns to deliver puns until the audience voted them off. The prize was a rubber chicken and a free drink. "You're a natural," Callum said. "You make puns without even trying. Imagine what you could do if you tried." Valentina said no. Then, because three roommates were chanting her name and she had always found it difficult to refuse a dare, she said yes.

She spent the next day in the university library, treating it as research. A pun, she reminded herself, was simply a word or phrase used so that two meanings were active at once, usually because two words sounded alike. English, with its enormous stock of homophones, was a paradise for this: knight and night, flour and flower, rain and reign, mussel and muscle. Spanish had puns too, of course, but Spanish words were mostly spelled the way they sounded, which made them less of a trap. In English, she concluded, the whole spelling system was practically a pun waiting to happen.

The back room of the Thistle and Crown was hot, dark and packed. Valentina was sixth on the list. The first five contestants were locals who had clearly done this before, and their puns came at the audience like hailstones. When her turn came, her mind went completely blank. She took the microphone, opened her mouth and heard herself say, in her most nervous accent, "Good evening. I am very happy to be on this sheep." The room exploded. The host had just described the show as a sinking ship, and she had meant to agree with him. Somebody at the back shouted, "Baa!" Valentina blinked, and then something clicked.

She stopped trying to hide her accent and started steering it. "In Venezuela," she told them, "we have five vowels. You have twelve. So when I arrived, I had to share mine out, like a mother with not enough biscuits." Laughter. "My landlord asked if I wanted to live here. I said I would love to leave here. We are still in negotiations." Bigger laughter. "Last night I ate haggis for the first time and told my friends I was a fool. They said, Valentina, you mean full. I said, after three plates? I mean both." She did six minutes, mixing her accidental puns with the homophones she had studied, and when she finished with the weather, "In Caracas, the sun rules. In Edinburgh, it is the rain's turn to reign," the room stamped its feet.

She did not win. The rubber chicken went, deservedly, to a retired postman from Fife who had been entering for nine years and told a story about envelopes that nobody could quite follow but everybody applauded. But Valentina came second, which earned her the free drink and, more importantly, an invitation from the host to come back the following night. She went back four times that week.

In September she wrote a short paper for her course on accidental wordplay in second-language speakers, and her supervisor said it was the most entertaining thing he had read in years. Her vowels, if anything, improved: it is hard to keep confusing two sounds once a whole room has laughed at the difference. But she kept a few mistakes on purpose, for special occasions. When Callum asked her, at the end of the summer, whether she had enjoyed the Fringe, she told him, with a perfectly straight face, that she had had a sheep-load of fun. He was never entirely sure which animal she meant.