Have you heard about the cow who drank ink and mooed indigo?

Or the one about the chap who lost his false teeth in Burma, and has been looking for his bridge on the River Kwai?

THE man on TIME'S cover this ' week has been fracturing friends and audiences for years with this brand of humor. For Bennett Cerf, astute publisher, is also well known on TV and off as an addicted punster. As such, he has a large, sympathetic but highly competitive following among TIME writers. The urge seems to be irresistible. The signs of a practicing paronomasian at work are easy to spot: the writer hunched over his typewriter chuckling to himself, the smile twitching the corner of his mouth as he turns the story in to be edited, the expectant grin as he waits for the researcher's guffaw when she reads his copy.

Many of TIME'S senior editors are dedicated to stamping out all puns except their own -which, of course, are far superior to those thought up by the troops. Imagine how proud World Writers John Blashill, Robert Jones and Jason McManus felt last April when their story on Kwame Nkrumah's zoo, titled Fangs a Lot, made the magazine -74 glorious lines of puns about what happened "since the day Nkrumah was ostrichized." The day after the story appeared, some of us had second thoughts; but to make matters worse, TIME readers respunded in kine: "Next time some anteloper in Ghana snake in and monkey around with the gnus, lemur know."

Every TIME writer cherishes some favorite puns he has managed to get into print. Richard Burgheim takes credit for calling the book Peyton Place a "peeping tome," while Alwyn Lee related in a book review how "the critics have been whooping it up in the Malamud salon."

Senior Editor Jesse Birnbaum can remember his carefree writer days, when a striking cement workers' union "threw in the trowel," and when a Mafia squabble over prostitute money proved that "too many crooks spoil the brothel."

Theater Critic Theodore Kalem takes his puns more seriously, recalling that James Joyce was an accomplished punster. Kalem used a pun from Finnegans Wake in an Essay on the theater: "As long as playgoers are yung and easily freudened . . ."

Cinema Reviewer Brad Darrach considers punning the "art of making a fool of yourself. They really should be silly and awful, to stir up your body." Brad's reviews are punctuated with puns: "Between bouts Presley Elviscerates a few songs"; the lead in the movie The Birds is an "Oedipus wreck"; and the Strategic Air Command hero's wife "chews him out for spending too much time in the SAC."

Not all TIME punsters are in the home office. One of the better (or worse, depending on how one looks at it) is Rome Bureau Chief Israel Shenker, who has been waiting a long while for an opportunity to speak out on the subject. He cables:

"You ask how we think them up. The problem is not thinking them up. I am compiling a volume of masterpieces that TIME has not run, entitled The Greatest Story Never Told. The villains are the editors, the heroes us. In the meantime, I plead guilty to the following: in Casablanca, the Moor the merrier; at the Berlin Wall, the best things in life are flee; Adenauer is der Alter Ego; and Khrushchev was the Vulgar Boatman."

Essayist Charles Lamb wrote: "A pun is a noble thing per se. It fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet, better." Of course, there is another quotation: "Anything awful makes me laugh." And that's Lamb's too.

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