It was good to hear celebrated the life of the wonderful Irish writer Flann O'Brien. The Great Lives programme on Radio 4 had time only to concentrate on the books and just touched on the other personae of a man who was brought up as an Irish speaker ("before it became fashionable") in Ulster - before the partition, of course - but made a living as a civil servant and writer in Dublin.
So there was no space for Myles na gCopaleen's (his identity as a columnist in the Irish Times) weakness for puns. A running gag comprised supposed dialogues between Keats and Chapman which concluded with a pun by Keats. This is the one I remember best: http://thirstygargoyle.tumblr.com/post/77263595398/keats-and-chapman-were-conversing-one-day-on-the/ (There is a representative sample of Myles at http://thirstygargoyle.tumblr.com/tagged/Flann-O'Brien) Myles was an obvious influence on the late, great, Miles Kington and to a lesser extent on other writers of humorous newspaper columns.
The classic Brian O'Nolan pun was surely the one which terminated a brave piece contributed to the Guardian newspaper in the early 1960s, and the one which introduced me to Flann O'Brien. It was a history of episodes in his writing life and his ambiguous relationship with organised religion, relating how each public criticism he made of the latter was followed by some seemingly divine punishment. It was funny and touching at the same time, culminating in a description of the facial cancer which was to kill him. The pay-off was that he supposed that the article had been his "agony in the Guardian".
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