‘It’s Always Punny in Philadelphia’ looks for the city’s best freestyle dad jokes

At around 11 a.m. on the last Sunday of Center City’s Open Streets, Aaron Schwartzbaum stood in front of the entrance of RIttenhouse Square, wearing a sandwich board and asking people if they wanted to hear a pun. 

“Free wordplay. Free dad jokes. Free puns,” he offered people who passed by.

Many politely said no. A number ignored him completely. But the few whose curiosity was piqued could choose a topic and Schwartzbaum would improvise a quippy line.

The Eagles were playing the Buccaneers in a couple hours, so that was on many people’s minds, and their shirts and caps. Schwartzbaum had a few options ready for that likely category.

“Why did Jalen Hurts go to Moscow?” he asked.

“Because he’s always rushin’.”

Schwartzbaum wasn’t just out there to make strangers cringe and, hopefully, laugh. He was promoting “It’s Always Punny in Philadelphia,” a pun-off competition at the Helium Comedy Club on Nov.  9 that he founded and emcees. He’s also been trying to grow the city’s “underground” pun competition scene.

“There are ones in New York, ‘Punderdome.’ I came up with D.C.’s one, which was called ‘Pun DMV’ — clever. There’s a national championship in Austin, I know Seattle has one, too. So they’re kind of all over the place,” he said. “When I was moving to Philly from D.C., there wasn’t a scene here, and so I wanted to bring that.” 

Schwartzbaum has been hosting competitions where people exploit the different meanings of words for the past two years in Philly. Along with “It’s Always Punny,” he’s hosted “South Street Pun-Off,” a smaller pun quizzo-and-improv challenge at Tattooed Mom that he created for wordplay wizards who are less comfortable getting on stage in front of a large crowd. 

This niche form of comedy isn’t new to Philly, or anywhere else for that matter. Pun and dad jokes have been around as long as dads. But Schwartzbaum has been growing a competitive, rap-battle style aspect to it around the city. 

Schwartzbaum said that the competition has seen success from all sorts of folks from different backgrounds, and there are still diamonds in the relatively untouched rough of the emerging pun scene.

“We have walk-ons who come and just mop up the competition, and that’s been so fun to see,” he said “It’s cool helping to build a very nascent scene. We’re still defining the culture of it and figuring out who the regulars are going to be.”

Lauren Vidas, an attorney who works in politics and government relations, was invited to last Fall’s “It’s Always Punny” by her friend who was judging some of the events. When the improv competition came up, the friend asked her to come up to help fill out the numbers.

“I had no intention of participating. I was incredibly hung over from the night before, so I was just sitting there, trying to get through my two-drink minimum to feel human again,” she said. 

Vidas mustered the energy to compete, and emerged as the champion in the audience voting. 

She’ll be returning for the second anniversary special to compete in the “Pundits” competition, where competitors try to pack a short monologue with as many puns as possible. 

“The challenge really isn’t the puns. The challenge is being able to tell a narrative where you incorporate them,” she said. “So it’s not just like a one-off here and there. You’ve got to come up with the story, keep the audience engaged, and also work in as many groan-inducing puns as possible while you do it. So it’s definitely a new challenge.”

Along with “Pundits,” the competitions for the upcoming event are “Headlines,” creating punny headlines for wacky news stories, and “Pundemonium,” the head-to-head freestyle competition where topics are pulled out of a hat.

What makes a — good? bad? maybe “successful” — pun? For Schwartzbaum, it isn’t so much about hitting people with as much wordplay per minute as possible. It’s about the windup and subverting the audience’s expectations. One of his go-to jokes for children was the best example of this.

“What is a pirate’s favorite letter of the alphabet,” he asks.

Most people intuitively, and justifiably, respond with “Arr.”

Schwartzbaum then quickly breaks into a pirate voice and responds, “You’d think it be ‘arr,’ but me first love be the sea.”

What doesn’t work? Well, rather than get too into the technicalities of what is and isn’t a pun, Schwartzbaum usually lets the audience judge whether a joke lands or not. He quickly learned about the double-edged sword that is a Philly crowd at his first event.  

“Very naive of me, I asked a room full of Philly sports fans if they were going to be merciful on a contestant who made a goof,” he said. “And this guy in the front row stands up and yells, ‘Send him home!’ The guy got summarily knocked out of the competition. I was like, ‘Oh my God, so mean.’ But then, as this guy left his stage, everyone in the audience was slapping him on the back, [saying] ‘Hey, way to put yourself out there, man. Good job.’ ”

When Vidas last competed in the improv competition, the theme was clothing. She was the last one to go, so most of the potential words to play had already been used up. All that she could think of that was unused was “lingerie.”

“My joke was , I have this landscaper and he’s French and he’s absolutely terrible at his job,” she said. “‘Every time I come home, I get out of my car and I say, ‘What’s up with the lawn, Giret?’  …  I mean it is probably the dumbest joke I’ve ever made, but the crowd absolutely lost it.”

What is the difference between a pun and a dad joke? Not much. Vidas argues that the circles in the Venn diagram are almost completely overlapping.

“There are dad jokes that are not puns, but I would say that almost every pun is kind of a dad joke,” she said. “I love a good dad joke — I should say I love a bad dad joke. That’s another form of comedy where the worse it is, the better it is. And I think that’s sort of the unifying theme between the two — the bigger the groan, the better the joke.

In hosting and promoting the events, Schwartzbaum has found that there’s no stereotypical type of person who is willing to hear some tortured wordplay. Pun and dad joke fans come in all shapes and sizes.

“I think that the most endearing piece of this is the cross-generational, racial, gender … You just had like all different groups coming up to let us tell bad jokes at them,” Schwartzbaum said of his times at RIttenhouse Square and other places.

“It’s Always Punny in Philadelphia,”  starts at 4:30 p.m. Tickets can be bought at Helium’s website. Helium’s shows are 21+, 18+ with a parent or guardian over 30. There is a two-item per person minimum in Helium’s Showroom.

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