I just can't be (completely) serious . . .

People groan at my puns, but I can't seem to resist playing around with words. Maybe this stems from my childhood in the Arkansas Ozarks, for I've always enjoyed wordplay.

If I were a comedian, I would use this one-liner:

"When I was a kid, we were so poor, we had only words to play with."

The follow-up:

"At Christmas, I'd find words in my stocking. If I'd been bad, I'd find even more words."

Further followed up by:

"For Thanksgiving, we'd always have 'turkey': Noun. 'a large North American gallinaceous bird . . . domesticated in most parts of the world.'"

We weren't alone in our poverty:

"The whole town was poor. At Halloween, the kids would go around trick-or-tricking."

"Come Fourth of July, our town would sing sweet freedom's song: 'Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.'"

Poor, yeah, but rich in humor. And to be honest, we had more than humor. As Sam Levenson would probably have put it, "We weren't poor. We had everything but money."