TAKING HIS MUMPS:

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship's "Punslingers" competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you've reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It's exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world's slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I'd been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we'd be punning on diseases--hence Ziek's joke about star-crossed livers--we began.

"Mumps the word!" I said, hoping that my voice wasn't shaking.

Ziek immediately fired back: "That was a measle-y pun." Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.

"Well, I had a croup-on for it," I responded. Whoa. Where'd that come from?

He switched gears. "I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes"--making a rubbing motion with his hand--"I like to rubella."

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases--oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. "If you've got a yam, and you've got a potato, whose tuber's closest?"

"There was a guy out here earlier painted light red," Ziek said. "Did you see the pink guy?"

"I didn't," I responded. "Cold you see him?"

Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we'd gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn't a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn't used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition--which Ziek won, for the fifth time.

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