James Boswell wrote most famously of the wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson, but he once aired his own thoughts on the nature of humor. A good pun, he remarked, “may be admired among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.”

A pun, for the record, is punderously defined as “the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.” Yuk! Good puns are little jewels. They deserve a better reputation than critics have given them.

Some memorable puns require the storyteller’s gift. There is one strung-out story about an Eastern monarch whose palace was guarded by two lions. Four legendary dolphins, thought to live forever, protected a moat. A lusty suitor for the monarch’s daughter had to cross state lions for immortal porpoises. Another improbable tale involves a powwow among the wise old women of a tribe. At a meeting in the trophy room to settle the late chief’s estate, two young men challenged the women’s authority. As it turned out, the squaw on the hippopotamus proved equal to the share of the sons on the other two hides.

Such wildly contrived puns are good for a groan. The smaller excellencies of wordplay call only for a smile of silent applause. Bridge writer Frank Stewart also had a story about a monarch. The ruler was deposed because he spent more time playing bridge than minding his country’s affairs. His reign was called on account of game.

Don Roberts, writing in Outdoor Life a few years ago, had good things to say of the Pacific Northwest. He was impressed by “the sudden sprawl of Portland – a city growing too big for its bridges.”

Joe Morgenstern, writing in The Wall Street Journal, liked the movie “Mission Impossible 2.” The lead actors, Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton, “make eye contact with the intensity of two Stealth fighters locking on target.” She is a superb actress with beauty to burn, “even if she usually keeps it at a simmer.” For better or worse, the film “is a very different fettle of kitsch from its stylish predecessor.” Nice, nice!

Morgenstern did not like “S.W.A.T.,” a movie about a team of commandos. The team succeeds, against absurd odds, in foiling a completely banal villain, “while the movie, whose only rigor keeps verging in mortis, fails by almost every measure …”

Rita Kempley of The Washington Post remarked that actress Joan Allen had been waiting for 20 years for a really big, on-screen, bodice-ripping buss. Most of her career had been spent playing an assortment of repressed wives – a hunt for a peck.

In The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, a copy editor came up with a fine headline for a feature about Pete and Genia Hartdegen, a newly married young couple who became a two-driver team. Immediately after their marriage they signed on to drive an 18-wheeler. Caption: “With this rig, I thee wed.”

Notice, please, that the best puns are the most compact ones. Brevity is indeed the soul of levity. The rule that applies to puns also applies to similes. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Henry Kisor was not impressed by a history of crime in the city. The tales were told “in prose as overstuffed as a whorehouse sofa.” In Opera News, a critic recalled a Metropolitan Opera broadcast in 1966. The German soprano “sounded as if she had gargled with a box of umlauts.” In Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly found little to admire in the Oakland Raiders’ Super Bowl loss to Tampa Bay. The poor job done by the Raiders’ line “made the evening longer than Kiwanis Poetry Night for quarterback Rich Gannon.”

Puns, similes, metaphors! They are the salt, pepper and garlic at a writer’s feast of language. Bon appetit!

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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