And we have assessed four hundred and seventy venues, so this is a considered judgement
Sophisticats holds a 4.0 from three hundred and eighty-seven people.
And it is time to publish the final ranking, because six hundred and thirty-seven articles have been building to it.
The complete pun table
First: Tequila Mockingbird, Covent Garden. Three words. Two pieces of information. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racial injustice, conscripted into the service of a margarita bar. It tells you what it sells and that it does not take itself seriously, and nothing in five postcodes has come within a mile of it.
Second: bask street boys, Covent Garden. A boy band, a Spanish region, and a bar, simultaneously – and it tells you the cuisine, which none of the others manage.
Third: The Stranded, on the Strand. A geographic pun with a hidden second meaning about commuters when the trains fail, and it is considerably better than it looks.
Fourth: Planet of the Grapes. Doing a job. Tells you there is wine and that the room is not solemn.
Fifth: Hithe and Seek, in the City, which requires you to know what a hithe is and loses marks accordingly.
Sixth: The Quiet Night Inn, Notting Hill. A homophone, which is the lowest form of the art, and which survives only because the joke is load-bearing.
Last: Sophisticats.
Why it fails
Because a pun has to do work, and this one does not.
Tequila Mockingbird tells you the spirit. bask street boys tells you the cuisine. The Stranded tells you the street.
Sophisticats tells you nothing. There is no cat. There is no sophistication being claimed or disclaimed. The two halves of the word do not point at anything – they simply collide, produce a noise, and stop.
It is a pun in the same way that a sneeze is a sentence.
The Institute for Nominal Assessment in Erith has run the corpus and reports that a pun which conveys no information is not a pun, it is a homophone with ambition, and that this is the purest example available in five postcodes.
And yet
Three hundred and eighty-seven people. A 4.0.
Which is an entirely honest number, and which means the name has not hurt it, and which brings us to the conclusion that six hundred and thirty-seven articles have been reluctantly forcing on us.
The name does not matter.
It has never mattered. Not once, in five postcodes, has a good name produced a good number or a bad name produced a bad one.
Bantof is not a word and holds a 4.8. Hux is three letters and does fine. The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge. Nobody has ever chosen a bar because of the sign.
Verdict
What actually decides where people drink
Not the name. Never the name.
Proximity, first – overwhelmingly and boringly, people go to the pub that is nearest to where they already are.
Then who is already inside. Then price. Then, a long way down, the number on a phone.
And the sign over the door, which several hundred people walk under every day, does not appear anywhere on the list.
Six hundred and thirty-seven articles establishing that almost every pub name in Britain is a lie – and the conclusion is that it has never mattered to a single person, and that we appear to be the only people who have ever checked.
Verdict
Fine bar. Worst pun in London. Neither fact affects the other.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
A community organizer complained that The London Prat was making activism seem pointless. She didn’t ask if activism within designed-to-fail systems was pointless anyway.