Pan Intended

This column was supposed to be entitled "Pan Intended." I took the name for a test drive with my family and friends, and then changed my mind because explaining what it meant started to sound like an apology. One particularly irritating exchange went like this:

Me: Since it’s going to be a humor column for young people, Pan Intended is a pun on "pun intended." So it’s like punning the word "pun" itself!

Wise-ass: Okay, but what is "pan" supposed to mean?

Me: Well, "pan" has several meanings. It could mean the cooking tool, Peter Pan, deadpan, or the camera movement. It could even mean bread!

Wise-ass: Bread, huh? Then don’t you think "Pan Intended" would be better as the name of a bakery?

Me (tear rolling down my cheek): Uh, Yes.

If there’s any lesson I learned from this, it is that thinking of a name is better done while doing chores, running errands. Keep your eyes open, and you’ll see that inspiration awaits you at every instance. You might want to have your clothes sewn at Elizabeth Tailoring Shop, or better yet, buy ready-to-wear Emporio Ourmoney. Grab a bite at Caintacky Fried Chicken. Have your hair trimmed at Harry d’Cutter. And go home and watch Mary da Potter.

Then you’ll see the whole thought process inside a Filipino’s head when coming up with a name. It is almost always borrowed, punned, or inspired from the foreign.

My philosophy professor in college once said that the pun was the lowest form of humor (satire, I suppose, being the finest). It’s a good thing Joey de Leon was never my classmate. He, like many Filipinos, is a punmaker extraordinaire. Think Starzan and Cheeta-e, Little Weapon, etc. (The origin of Wow, Mali!, however, continues to mystify me.)

I’ve always believed that the bedrock of modern Pinoy humor has always been the pun, more than slapstick or toilet humor or green jokes. We brazenly enjoy the inanity of the second-rate, trying-hard copycat. We refer to our artistas as the Elvis Presley (Eddie Gutierrez), Michael Jackson (Gary V.) and Mariah Carey (Regine Velasquez) of the Philippines. A peculiarity, considering we never refer to foreign celebrities as the Judy Ann Santos of Hollywood (Reese Witherspoon?), the Joseph Estrada of the White House (Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush), or the Roderick Paulate of the UK (Rick Astley?), despite obvious similarities in looks, packaging, or dance techniques.

Any socio-anthropologist worth his khakis would tell you that the way a culture names names is a pretty good indicator of its world-view as well as its self-image. The most self-loving of all, the French, is an excellent example. To ensure cultural cohesion, their government once came out with a recommended list of names—all of which were considered "genuinely French"(e.g. Jean, Louis, Paulette, Simone, Claude, etc.)—from which citizens were obliged to choose to christen their children. On the other end, we have ourselves. Apart from the rare Dakila or Kidlat or Mayumi, there are quite a few names considered "genuinely Filipino," which is not surprising since most of our surnames are quite frankly Spanish. When naming the kids, we can match the surname with another Spanish name (Jose, Juan, Maria), or we can go Russian (Ivan), English (John) or American (Heather, Tiffany, Britney). And then there are the hybrids from different sources, like Maria Mildred Daphne Batungbakal, or mating off the parents’ names, like Estelyn, from Esteban and Evelyn. And then there are the unforgettable Heherson, Jejomar, and Luzviminda, or the downright bizarre like Washington Dee Sy and Edgar Allan Pe.

Obviously, the Filipino race is not a pure race, and so we are definitely not a purist race, and the icons and images that abound in our culture are almost always blended strains of our multi-colonial past and our globalizing present. The most enduring symbol in Filipino postcards is the jeepney, which was originally an American military vehicle that was lengthened, embellished, and put to commercial use by enterprising and war-hardened Pinoys. It now looks very little like the Jeep Cherokee despite their same progenitor; in some textbooks, it is spelt dyipni, and in one magazine it was hailed as the "stainless steel Pajero"; on some major thoroughfares, it has been pushed to extinction by the dull, gray FX, and then some say that soon it just might end up parked inside the National Museum Historical Relic Room. How disconcerting indeed that the most enduring symbol of Filipino ingenuity and aesthetic judgment has this sort of past, present and future.

Pessimists may lament that all these are symptoms of a "damaged culture," a civilization of wannabes, an entrenched institutionalization of gaya-gaya and bastardizing. They say that we are pathetic scavengers of Western garbage. We are colonial mentality’s worst case scenario incarnate. And we have a sense of humor that is the lowest of them all.

But this is it, precisely. Our silly puns make us laugh, and when we do we laugh at ourselves. We laugh at our labels, we laugh at the temerity by which we spin off Western icons, we laugh at how we could possibly come up with the names we have. It’s our way of putting one over the West, Mang Donald’s giving the finger to McDonald’s.

We Filipinos laugh till it hurts. Maybe the joke is on the West. Maybe the joke is on us. Either way, we know that our signs and symbols are what we make of them, regardless of their origin, or their original meaning. Our punny humor is funny to us, only because it means something to us, even if it would fall flat on Main Street, USA, or be considered in bad taste on a Grand Boulevard in Europe, or just be plain puzzling in Tokyo. What matters is: we get the joke.

And so, I named this column.

Get it?

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Editor’s note: Paula Nocon, 25, has been a TV reporter, a sandwich vendor, a corn planter and a movie extra. She is currently a lecturer of Development Communication at the Ateneo de Manila University, but would like to be a Tai Chi instructor in the next life (when China is already a superpower). E-mail her at star_polanox@yahoo.com