I might be either too young or too old to find this appealing. It’s the 21st century and people facing each other in performance pun competitions. It may not personally appeal to me, but I love that there are people who are actually doing this. It expands the width and breadth of live stage performance in a way that’s really, really difficult to translate to any mass medium. So it’s expanding people’s appreciation of live performance and I’m highly in favor of that.
If you’re the type of person who might enjoy watching people compete in performance punmanship (and you know who you are) then you probably already know about the Pundamonium Milwaukee Pun Slam that’s taking place Friday, Feb. 12 at Shank Hall. If you’re not familiar--if you’re morbidly curious, here’s the way it works: one by one, ten contestants have two minutes each to improvise puns based on prompts they are given ahead of time. Each contestant is immediately judged by five members of the audience who have been selected to be show judges. (One would hope that this is a voluntary selection, but it’s not actually specified in promo text.) There’s a second round in which the contestants only have 30 seconds to come-up with puns from prompting and another two minutes each to spill them out into the microphone. The top four contestants to head-to-head in one final pun-off.
Pundamonium: The Milwaukee Pun Slam takes place on Friday, Feb. 12 at Shank Hall on 1434 N. Farwell Ave. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. The puns start at 8:00 p.m. For more info, visit Shank Hall online.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
