Spectator competition winners: pun for your life (poems about puns containing puns)

The latest challenge was to submit a poem about puns containing puns. Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan. Robert Schechter’s four-liner – ‘Opun and shut’ – caught my eye:

As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’

Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J. Webster snaffles the extra fiver.

W.J. Webster ‘No hurry,’ said the nurse, ‘more haste less peed.’ Or did she? Words I find may mix and match: I hear my hair is starting to re-seed, While thinking, ‘Alopecia, goodbye thatch.’ A girl I knew once (when I was hirsuter) Liked being chased to titillate and tease; She lost me in a forest, being cuter — I couldn’t see the wooed there for the trees.