I recently noticed, for the first time, that “Byrd” and “Cage” are right next to each other in the Gramophone classical-music guide. I thought it might be an occasion to have some innocent fun at the expense of the Intelligent Design advocates: Aha! I imagined them declaring. The pun of Byrd-Cage makes sense, therefore the arrangement of the music guide cannot possibly be random! While in reality, of course, the arrangement of the names in the guide is both random (juxtaposing two composers as different from each other as can be imagined) and intelligently designed (as alphabetization makes the random names easier to find). The Intelligent Design theorists are right to intuit an intelligent design, but wrong in how they go about trying to prove it.

But the more I think about it, the more I think there’s something to that italicized statement above, the one I chortlingly put in the mouth of the ID advocates. Coincidences of this kind point to the fact that meaning is more complicated than mimesis and generalization: Echoes, rhymes of one thing with another, are at work in the typical pun, and they make sense in a way that’s deeper than we can account for by the working of an algorithmic process designed to imitate the extramental world. Could it possibly be funny that one algorithm is similar to another? Puns, like metaphors, prove that the mind can meaningfully unite things that are dissimilar as well as those that are similar — that there is a level of sense different from the level of material fact, or of the intellectual mirroring of (and generalization about) material fact.

Homo ridens (laughing man) has been proposed as an alternative name for our species; our ability to laugh may indeed suggest something important about us and the world.