calembour

In due time the executors were put in possession of Calembour's story, and, made wiser by former mistakes, they gave no signs of incredulity to the florid narrator's wildest flight by which to enhance the value of his services, but treated him as a gentleman; and even agreed in the readiest manner to reward his kindness by the gift of a thousand pounds, as soon as they should obtain St. Udo Brand's consent.

Speaking of Joyce's language, says Ogden: "The intensive, compressive, reverberative infixation; the sly, meaty, oneiric logorrhoea, polymathic, polyperverse; even the clangorous calembour, irresponsible and irrepressible, all conjure us to penetrate the night mind of man, that kaleidoscopic recamera of an hypothecated Unconscious, jolted by some logophilous Birth-trauma into chronic serial extension."

He was most capital company, rolling out perpetual jokes and calembour, and bubbling over with exuberant joie de vivre.

Our English "pun" is a clumsy thing compared to the finesse of a neatly-turned French calembour.