Imagine for a moment that Dorothy Parker is still alive. Imagine that her Algonquin antics have secured her a one-woman tour of China. Imagine her being informed by the snappily titled State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China that puns have effectively been outlawed across media and advertising, as they were last week.
Now imagine Parker addressing her audience: "If all the bureaucrats at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China Christmas ball were laid end to end …," she pauses, "they would make one long line of female State Administrators, and no mistake."
The announcement restricting double entendres - cue headlines about "pun control" - argued, not unjustly, that puns "can create misunderstandings for the public, especially for minors. They need to be firmly corrected."
In the appendix to 1984 that defined Newspeak, George Orwell implied that Big Brother's beef with the word "free" was, aptly, that it could mean more than one thing: "The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is free from weeds'. It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free' since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless."
This anarchic liberation of meaning goes some way to explaining why monarchs and dictators alike have viewed jokes and laughter with much the same enthusiasm as female heirs and weapons inspectors.