Welcome To PUNderland: The Great Philbrook Pun-Off
Philbrook Museum of Art
Tulsa
June 21, 2024
I love it when Philbrook does something outside their realm of expertise. During his eight years as its CEO, Scott Stulen — who recently announced that he’s taking a job as Director of the Seattle Museum of Art — made a point of positioning the museum as a fun space, not just as a museum, and that tactic works well in terms of crowd accumulation, even if the Fun Things themselves are sometimes a little awkward. The Philbrook Pun-Off was no exception.
With a crowd of around 100 gathered along the South Formal Garden on a hot Friday night, the event — which promised to tie in to the exhibition “Breaking the Binding,” but that was never really addressed — succeeded in getting people to the museum. The competition itself was a little haphazard; host Evan Hughes, while in genial form, seemed to be creating the structure of the night from whole cloth, several times leaning over to ask Philbrook staff what the rules were. Full disclosure: I was an employee of Philbrook from 2018 – 2020 and reserve the right to make fun of them.
The star of the night was undoubtedly Karl Jones, who, instead of participating in the competition, performed a Pun-o-logue (a monologue of puns) before each round, expounding upon the themes (Gardens, Art, Architecture, and Philbrook/Tulsa). It’s unfortunate that so much of the show was about people riffing off the tops of their heads, because Karl’s well-thought-out puns got the biggest laughs of the night: “Dada is here, and dada wants to hear you Mon-a-Lisa.”
After Karl’s Pun-o-logues, the competitors would gather around the microphones, chosen one-by-one by Hughes to come up to ply their wordplay. My favorite? In the category of Philbrook/Tulsa: “You know, I’ve got a lot of baby mommas around town, a baby momma in Bixby, a baby momma in Broken Arrow, a baby momma in West Tulsa, a baby momma in Midtown.… I know when I come to Philbrook I’m supposed to feel cultured, but I mainly just phil broke.”
The South Formal Garden would have been a nice choice for a setting if the PA speakers had been chained all along the stretch of the garden; instead they were all at the bottom, where the competitors were. Thus much of the material wasn’t audible to people in the back, especially when the competitors didn’t speak up.
That said, it was a perfectly enjoyable evening of watching people try to pun their way through the topics. Chelsea Green won the whole thing through a final “Sudden Death” round; after all that forethought, winning the night depended upon endurance punning. Green walked away with the win after delivering this absolutely insane pun: “I was walking down the streets of Tulsa for the first time in my life.… That’s right, I popped my Cherry Street.” Well. Yes, I suppose so. The prize was a $100 gift card to the Museum Shop — and, I assume, bragging rights.
Next at Philbrook: 2024 Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Tour, June 28
