A geek's love for puns.

Who hasn't "enjoyed" the rapid exchange of puns that geeks quickly engage in as soon as they are set lose in a meeting room? I found Ullman's musings about this quite interesting:

My first reaction to programmer punning had been a certain curiosity. The reason for compulsive punning among computer people seemed interesting, ripe for study. Perhaps this would be my ticket to tenure, I thought. My time spent as a "quality-assurance engineer" would not be seen as falling away from academia but as... fieldwork! I would write papers. I would be invited to the next meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. There I would tell a learned but computer-illiterate audience how programmers had to work in the relentlessly literal language of code, where one slip of a letter reduced everything to incomprehensibility. The compiler, I would tell them, is a computer program that translates the programmer's code into a set of instructions that can be executed by the microprocessor, the chip at the heart of the machine. The compiler is the entity the programmer must talk to, the creature he or she must make understand the intentions embodied in the code. But this compiler-creature is error-intolerant to a fault; it demands a degree of exactness that is exhausting, painful for an intelligent human being. Leave out a comma, and the compiler halts, affronted at the slightest whiff of error. Fix the comma, run the compiler again, then it halts again, this time at a typo. Puns, I would say, represented a human being's pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer's conversation with the machine!

(People coming up to shake my hand. One of whom tells me about an opening at the University X, for which I should apply immediately. I would be short-listed at once.)

But as my time at Telligentsia progressed, I began to see something more sinister in the programmers' penchant for puns. It wasn't an upwelling of humanistic impulses in the face of the mute machine; it wasn't a cry for the sweet confusion of being human. Quite the contrary, it was an act of disdain for the complicated interchange known as conversation: for its vagaries, lost and meandering trails, half-understandings, and mysterious clarities. For the meaning of a pun is clear, all too clear. It demands a leap in understanding, to the exact place the punner demands. It's the programming of a conversation. Llike the GOTO instruction in code, Go here, jump to this place, unconditionally. Forget about the person Chuck Glover, the desire to know something, Raisa Vastnov's hope for an answer to her question. Would. Chuck. How much wood. Duck. Fuck. A ricochet. A question goes out in a direction, to a listener, a potential answerer, then off it flies at some bizarre trajectory. To take a word at the level of sound, to feel absolutely free (and delighted!) to take that word anywhere language suggested, never mind the intention of the person talking to you —there is something fundamentally hostile in a pun.

(Ullman: pp. 59-60)

As for me, I don't know. I think that perhaps Ullman is just over-analyzing here. I like puns. I like the type of jokes that play with our assumptions about language, concepts and situations. Is that typical of a geek? I don't know, but I certainly like it far more than the typical slapstick humor, not to talk about "jokes" based on denigrating other people or the ones based on bodily functions.