The other day I watched the movie Psycho for the first time. The reason was that Tomo, the Japanese staffer who keeps J-List well stocked with anime Blu-rays and import anime PS Vita games, is a hardcore connoisseur of everything from the music of Zed Zeppelin and Bob Dylan to all the major and minor films of Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, and he’s regularly shocked at the idea that an American (me) could go through life not knowing much about these things. When he asked me what I thought about the film, my reply was a foregone conclusion: I told him it was 最高 saikoh, a Japanese word meaning “the greatest,” which happens to have the pronunciation as Psycho, making it one of the more famous puns in Japanese. The way to say “what is this?” in Japanese is 何ですか? nan desu ka?, and it’s virtually impossible to eat Indian naan bread someone joking, “What is this? Is it naan bread?” I’ve got a window shelf where I put cans that are waiting to be crushed and thrown away, and the other day I referred to it as my “CanColle,” e.g. my can collection, a play on the moe WWII ship game Kantai Collection. I thought it was a pretty good joke, but my otaku son didn’t laugh — kids these days have no sense of humor.
Puns are fun!
