Puns and why they are counter-productive to productive processes

Once a pun a time, there was a man whose mind was ruined by a pun.

What does this sentence invoke within one's brain? Feelings of glee and a light chuckle may come from some, but others may feel a groan of displeasure with their face in their palm. However, whichever emotion is felt, this is disruptive to thought processes because not only does it cause someone to first think about the pun itself for a few minutes to understand it, but then they must waste more time responding to it. This first brings up the question of how would one measure if this is truly disruptive. 

Let us assume that a person is able to do one action and have one thought at a time. These can be connected to the same task ideal, but do not need to be and can be completely unrelated. Let us also assume that the pun fills the thought first and then become an action. 

Now, while one is thinking about the pun and its play on words, they can not be thinking of anything else. While they being productive physical, this is more of just idle work that any trained servant can do. So, as one thinks about the pun, they are not only losing important thinking time, but their physical work is also wasted to something of a lower rank does. Then the brain has processed the pun and then it moves into the action response. While the idle work is perhaps better done by those of lower rank, it is still productive work until the pun reaction comes. Whatever the reaction may be, the idle work stops, but it does free up the mind. Or does it? In order to properly respond the mind needs to process the correct bodily reaction and preform it. Thus, a secondary thought is made and thus even more time is used up with this pun.

One could argue that all of this only takes place over a few minutes, assuming understanding of the pun in the first place. This raises the question what things of importance could be done within these few minutes that are wasted? 

There are a few ways to look at an answer to this question. One view is that the few minutes are trivial and any productive thoughts that are created in those moments will still happen and have the same impact despite of when they happen. And this is perhaps true, but the essence of the answer is that our time is important. And every moment wasted, however small, does add up. For example - within a given day, if one hears perhaps five puns, this could add up to anywhere between twenty-five and fifty minutes. If over the course of a month, one hears five days worth of puns this brings us to one hundred twenty-five and two hundred fifty minutes of time. This through the year adds up to one thousand five hundred and three thousand minutes of wasted time reacting to puns. While this is only between a half day and just under, this is a decent amount of time that could be better put to use.

This is just a small faction of time each year. To most, this small amount of time is an acceptable allotment to enjoy such things has puns. However, this brings up an important point of being a willing subject to such verbal art. Can someone who would rather spend this time thinking of other things can just write it off? This answer is perhaps the whole point to the question of this short essay, 'how productive are puns to society?'

And the answer to this is largely personal. It will vary depending who is asked. The degree of the yes or no will also change based on the person. And to this, when using puns, the pun-artist should use their best judgment in regards to the audience when producing such verbal works.

However, as with anything, there is always another side. Puns are still works of word-art. Art is always something of high value, more so in Hallifax. So this brings us to a topic that all artists dread - 'how great is this work of art?' if the answer to this question is a 'no' and applied to all puns, then the debate returns to a personal level that will have the ever varying answers. But what if the answer is a 'yes'?

Now, if this the case, the personal answer is partly overshadowed. It goes from being a trivial question to something of substance. Something that can be more closely debated like any other piece of art. At this point then, there could be many people who devote a significant unit of time to puns. With all this, A more cloudy answer appears to the question. That answer is 'maybe.' All questions that deal with maybes are the ones that are explored. They are looked at from all points by people who find interest in them. This 'maybe' answer is what drives people to try and change that 'maybe' to a 'yes' or 'no'.