the pun - mighter than the word?

I think it is. I always have. Why settle for only one meaning when you could have two or even three for the same money? I had an English teacher, Mr Something-Italian-That-Began-With-an-A, who used to thunder from the front of the room: "The pun is the lowest form of humour!" I used to laugh like a drain, till I gradually realised that he wasn't even trying to be funny. I'm not sure what I was even doing in the vicinity of his apartment, but I have a distinct if hazy memory of trying to argue the toss with him on the subject of puns while standing on his doorstep trying to fend off his annoying little dog.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I think puns are pretty much the highest form of humour - using the most parts of the brain to the most effect - except for the final, highest-of-all form, which is the distillation of heavenly essence and doesn't even need to contain a joke (in the same manner as that in which the greatest Sumo champion might beat his opponent without ever laying a finger on him).

And that is why I was so happy to find a bagetelle of great sweetness on Maud Newton's blog: a small piece on Edmund Wilson, "excoriating" Nabakov's punning.

Maud writes:

"Reading Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s, I was amused to discover a review — dated September 9, 1944 — excoriating Nabokov’s puns. (The book under consideration is Nabokov’s study of Nikolai Gogol.)

'The reader is also annoyed by the frequent self-indulgence of the author in poses, perversities and vanities that sound as if he had brought them away from the St. Petersburg of the early nineteen-hundreds and piously preserved them in exile; and, along with them, a kind of snapping and snarling on principle at everything connected with the Russian Revolution that sometimes throws the baby out with the blood bath — to be guilty of a species of witticism to which Mr. Nabokov is much addicted and which tends, also, a little to disfigure his book. His puns are particularly awful. In writing English, he has not yet acquired the sense of how horribly “the government specter” and “Gogol’s spa’s were not really spatial” are calculated to grate on English-speaking readers.'"

Bliss. The government specter. Click on the link, there's a beautiful picture, too.