At other times, Collins, tepidly at first, would try out a few puns on the crew. Once the floodgates opened, the waters flowed: Collins could not stop himself. “Some of them were good,” De Long judged, “and some wretchedly poor.” Just as often, his puns were incomprehensible, turning on a joke, perhaps Irish in origin, that the others just didn’t get. “For a while we steadily refused to see his puns,” De Long wrote, “and would all look at him as innocently and inquiringly as babies when he got one off, asking him to explain it two or three times over, until he finally exclaimed that our
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