Club-Winged Manakins and Punsters: Too Sexy to Survive?

It’s Andy here today. Ann is in OurLittleCorner thinking spicy thoughts.

I have long wondered why I have such a penchant for making puns. Do I have some sort of interpersonal disorder that requires therapy? Is it a need for attention? Is it a subconscious cry for help?

Then I read about club-winged manakins in Richard Prum’s delightful book The Evolution of Beauty and It dawned on me that the mating rituals of these little South American birds may hold the key to explaining my obsession with puns. Let me elaborate.

Prum argues that female aesthetic preferences and mate choices is a critical aspect of evolution that has been ignored, especially with regard to why certain features have evolved even if they were detrimental to survival.  Prum uses the club-winged manakin as one case in point. I’ll get to how this relates to human puns a bit later.

To start with, as is common with birds, it’s the female that wears the pants when it comes to selecting a mate. Also typical of birds, a male will knock himself out acting goofy in hopes of attracting one of the females watching on the sidelines. In the case of club-winged manakins, the females are most attracted to males that can make the sexiest whirring or buzzing sound (which is produced by rubbing their wings together). You’ve got see the below video to appreciate the humiliating lengths to which a male will go to catch a female’s eye (and ear).

The catch is that to make that sexy “whirring” sound the ulna bones in the males’ wings had to evolve to be abnormally thick; the thicker the bones the louder the “whir” and the more likely to be “selected” by females (and to pass their genes on to the next generation). The evolutionary irony, if there is such a thing, is that the added weight of the thickened wing bones hinders their flight, making it increasingly difficult to survive. In short, the aesthetic preferences of those finicky females could be leading club-winged manakins to extinction.

This brings me to the disturbing parallel that can be found between the “whirring” of club-winged manakins and the punning antics of male Homo sapiens. John Pollack, in The Pun Also Rises, claims that puns have been around since the invention of language. Not only that, there’s some speculation that humor (including puns) has evolutionary relevance. I found this on Purplesquish.com.

Indeed, as reported recently in Psychology Today, modern women are attracted to men with a sense of humor and men are attracted to women who appreciate their humor. This certainly looks like Prum’s “aesthetic preferences and mate choices” in action. And what could be a more pure and concise form of humor than the pun, which I would suggest is much like that pure and concise “whir” of the club-winged manakin?

I’m sure that by now you see where I’m headed with all of this. Puns, aside from attracting a potential mate, have little practical survival value (especially for us monogamous humans). Similar to the manakins struggling with their aerodynamically-deficient wing bones, the pun-obsessed males of our species must deal with a troublesome interpersonal handicap – people, even female type people, can tolerate only so many puns. On top of that, punsters are destined to pass their pun genes to their progeny. Whether this eventually will lead to the extinction of the punster segment of our population remains to be seen.

To conclude, I’m hoping that if you take away anything from all of this it will be to have gained a bit of tolerance for those among us who incessantly blurt out bad puns. Just keep in mind that what you are hearing is the product of thousands of years of evolution driven by female preferences over which punsters have little control. So, instead of groaning when you hear a bad pun, conjure up an image of that little club-winged manakin sitting on a twig raising his butt and making that pathetic “whir.” It may even make you smile.