After not watching American Idol since its first season, I am now back to being a regular viewer, largely because of my job. As editor of the TV review section, it would be difficult for me to reconcile ignoring the number one (and often number two and three) show in America. I don’t have to like it, but I do have to watch it.

I was watching it the other night and noticed a finalist named Luke Menard. This guy is handsome in a Scott Speedman way: if you averaged out the looks of every good-looking man in the world, you’d get him. It’s a handsomeness that seems to come with no character whatsoever.

But here’s what I found really interesting about him. He proudly announced that he’s a member of an a cappella group called Chapter 6, and they tour all over the world. I was shocked to find out that there was an a cappella group that tours all over the world. A cappella is a phenomenon that has fascinated me for years, because other than lacrosse, it is the only activity that can get you laid a lot in college, but abruptly loses all cachet after graduation.

When I went to Tufts, there was a group called the Beelzebubs. They were cool. I mean, not cool in a way that any guy would admit. You would never overhear any male student saying, “Shit, if I only had the balls to sing tenor on George Michael’s ‘Faith.’ Then I’d be someone.” But women loved it. During freshman orientation, I remember being at a dorm event when all of a sudden a flash of news swept through the crowd as if Elvis had just been spotted at the dining hall: They’re coming! The Beelezebubs are coming! To sing to US! Even among new students who had never heard them, they already had an enviable rep. How did that happen? Who ever heard a cappella in high school, let alone thought about it enough to judge it as awesome?

And then they bounded in, gathered in that semicircle they all did (rubber-faced bass guy in the back), and began singing some James Taylor tune that they’d pepped up with eight-part harmony and an array of finger snaps. And the ladies swooned. In between songs they’d do the regulation a cappella skits, and then when the final big laugh came, instantly run back into formation for some other song that involved the lanky guy on the side beating air drums and doing some beat box. Beat box! White guys singing harmony and doing beat box! This should get wedgies, not adulation!

Yet they were huge, and only got huger as the year progressed. The next morning after a concert, you’d be sitting with some female friends, and the subject of last night’s concert would come up, and one would say, “And Andre did Elvis Costello’s ‘Allison!’” And all the women would let out a deep sigh in ten-part deep-sigh harmony.

For a cappella! What the hell? I know I sound like some bitter guy who’s angry about other guys being popular, but it was the nonsensicality of it that really nagged at me. I was a guy constantly looking for the secret to getting girls, and this flew in the face of every shred of evidence I had previously accumulated. I looked at the outside world and nothing in it would indicate that a cappella was an aphrodisiac. It would be like finding out that women got really hot for rebus puzzles.

The Beelzebubs would put out a CD a year, and they’d tour to other colleges, where they’d hook up with that school’s a cappella fans. What did the women see? Was it their fantastically creative pun group names? I found this site that lists college a cappella group names. Here’s a selection, and they're a more painful group than bead stores: Hamilton College’s Hamiltones, the Illinois State Acafellaz, and Lafayette’s Chorduroys (OUCH). MIT has both the Chorallaries and the Logarythms (ERG). There’s the UNC Clef Hangers (STOP IT!) and the Northwestern Treblemakers (SERIOUSLY, CUT THE SHIT!) Oberlin has Nothing But Treble (WHICH JUST SUMMONS UP AN IRRITATING SOUND) and the U Penn Jewish group, the Shabbatones (YOU PEOPLE ARE BAD FOR THE JEWS!). And that’s just a smattering from the H-R page.

Here’s some names I came up with that I am willing to sell to any university: The Tone Defs, Mu-sick to My Stomach, the Melo-D-plus, Note What I Mean, Vern?, Harmo-Knee to the Groin, Rotten to the Chorus, Scattlebutt, and the Dipshitz. Actually, some of these groups might actually exist; I didn’t have the patience to go through the entire website to rule them out.

When my friend Jerry got married in 1995, he told me at the rehearsal, in a hushed tone, that a friend of his fiancée would be singing, and he was a Whiffenpoof! That’s the a cappella group at Yale, in case you didn’t know. And why should you know? It’s a college a cappella group! Do you know the call letters of the Princeton radio station? Of course not! Because it doesn’t matter to anyone who's not just out of college, but out of that college.

After he’d said it about four times, I asked Jerry what the big deal about the Whiffenpoof was. He just kind of shrugged; he kept stressing it because his fiancée had told him to stress it. And I’m guessing it was the Whiffenpoof who asked her to stress it. I wanted this stopped. It was after college: we don’t have to pretend a cappella is interesting anymore!

When is the last time you found yourself wanting to listen to a cappella? When have you been listening to music and thought, “This would be good...if only it wasn’t for all those damn instruments!” As far as I know, the only a cappella group to break out was Rockapella, and that was really because they did the theme song for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Which makes them the same kind of phenomenon as The Rembrandts, who did the Friends theme song: Anyone’s affection for them goes as far as their affection for the show, and no further.

People talk about how college is a time for people to try on new identities: you can be an activist, a poet, a frat guy, or a druggie. But what is it about that time that makes you want to experiment with a cappella? Is a cappella the bisexuality of music? You want to shock your parents with your love of vocal-only music, and once graduation hits and you’re out in the real world, you quickly forget it and go back to the traditional way.

There’s a guy who used to be in one of the Tufts a cappella group (we had about 43, or maybe it just felt that way) who has for years tried to preach the a cappella gospel after graduation. He is convinced that he can make a cappella a national craze among adults. Every year or so in our alumni magazine there is a little article or class note about him and all the progress he’s making. Really, progress? I haven’t noticed any a cappella burning up the charts. I haven’t heard any a cappella on the radio. I used to have satellite radio – both XM and Sirius – in my car and they have narrowcasted stations for seemingly every type of music around, but nary an a cappella station. Perhaps they're concerned it would cause too much road rage.

Judging from the list of a cappella groups still going strong at colleges, it looks like it remains a timeless trend. (Though if any current college students beg to differ, I’d love to hear it. I am relying on the most anecdotal of evidence.) Which makes it even stranger: while other musical trends come and go from generation to generation, this one remains strong, albeit just for those four years of a person’s life. It’s odd that a period of one’s life that is usually devoted to debauchery is also the period that is devoted to the squarest music around. I suppose we should be glad that most kids get both out of their system by the time they graduate.

P.S. For any singer who found this post because of a Google alert on “a cappella” and was expecting to find an enthusiast, I apologize that you had to find the cold, hard truth about your passion this way. I hope it does not render your snapping fingers limp with shock.

Look, I don’t want to beat this pun thing to death. But I wanted to share something that got cut from the magazine the other day.

It was a picture of Beyonce. I needed a caption. I came up with this:

“Free to Beyonce, you and…meyonce?”

I was prouder of it than I am of my own book.

I was the only one who liked it. In fact, my coworkers not only didn’t like it, they visibly winced. When I told Christine about it later, she rolled her eyes so hard they bounced up the stairs.

It was cut from the magazine. I suspect Beyonce’s people had it quashed. It is the only explanation for such brilliance being stifled.

Some people would say it is very sad that I am so proud of this stupid pun that I had to post it on my blog. And by “some people” I mean BEYONCE!

Well, at least something good will come out of this. I will get people reading this blog who are googling “Beyonce” rather than just Josh Duhamel’s penis.

A few months ago, I started editing Entertainment Weekly’s TV-review section. One of the most rewarding parts of this job? Coming up with the headline puns.

If you read the magazine, you know that there’s nothing EW likes more than a good pun. Every headline has one, and most captions. And if you know me, you know there’s nothing I like more than rhyming. Not in a cool, freestyle rap kind of way, but rather in an annoying, “Heartthrob? More like fart-throb!” kind of way.

Here’s the process of coming up with a punny headline. I stare at the title of the show we’re reviewing, and then begin the intricate process of swapping the first letter of one of the words out with every other letter of the alphabet. For example, let’s use our recent review of the idiotic Cashmere Mafia as an example.

(Actually, let me first interrupt with a quick point on Cashmere Mafia and its doppelganger, Lipstick Jungle. Here’s what I learned about powerful women by watching these shows:

1) They want it all.
2) They really don’t see their kids that much. Not because they’re busy having it all, mind you, but rather because they’re busy meeting up with their best pals whining about how hard it is to have it all. I just hope part of “it all” is “a cracked window,” so their kids can breathe while they’re gone.
3) They like to spend their time trying on hats.
4) They all have imperious, British bosses.
5) They are never happier than when they can flop on a giant couch with their best friends and laugh, laugh, laugh!)

Anyway, back to the puns. The first thing I do is take one word out of the title, and then swap the first letter out for every other letter in the alphabet, looking for another word. i.e. ashmere, bashmere, dashmere, fashmere, gashmere… This is the same process I used to make sure none of the names we came up with for our daughters would be easily mockable. No “Cassandra” for us, thank you very much. (Christine got very annoyed at my ability to find the potential mockery in any name, thus ruining many of her favorites for her, even if they were jokes that no child would likely think of. For example, she always loved the name “Annalee,” until I said, “Are you kidding?” I replied. “How about ‘that suppository was inserted annalee?”)

This headline-by-rhyme plays into an addiction of sorts I have. I’ve always loved to make up songs in the car, most often with my college roommate, Stu. We could spend two hours on the road growling impromptu bluesy odes to an annoying woman who had lived on our freshman hall and was most memorable for eating frosting out of the can. This predilection for rhyming translates to regular life. When I lived in L.A., my friend and coworker Dan equally loved to make dumbass rhymes. If, making lunch plans, one of us said, “How about Chipotle?” the other would say, “How about Chipot-nay” and it would make our day. Again, not particularly funny. But imagine if this kind of thing went on all day long. Funny now? Wait, I can’t hear you with your head in the oven!

It got to the point where the rhymes didn’t even make sense, they were just reflexive. Sample:

“I’ve gotta go park my car.”
“More like you’ve gotta go shark your car.”
“Yes, it is more like that. I will go shark my car.”

One day, we were going to get lunch, and I said, “You want to get paninis?” to which Dan replied, “More like panin-don’t.” Completely nonsensical and ridiculous. Not even a pun. You know how recovering drug addicts have that story they tell of the moment they hit rock bottom and acknowledged they had a problem? This was the moment we both realized we had a punning problem. It was the pun equivalent of gambling away your son’s college fund.

Anyway, I tried to slow down after that, but now my job involves doing it all day long. It’s like an alcoholic getting a job at a bar. But I suppose it’s nice to have an outlet for it.

So back to Cashmere Mafia. There was nothing in changing letters in Cashmere, so I just used the entire word, hoping I could pun off one of the two syllables. Eventually, I made it: “CASHMERE” TRIFLE. Not one of my best, I’m just trying to explain the process. You know, the really dull process? Yeah, that process.

But I bring it all up to explain that it consumes me. As Christine will attest, I never come home prouder than when I’ve come up with a good pun. Like a recent box we did on returning Trading Spaces host Paige Davis: EMCEE HAMMERS. Yes, it still nags at me that in the picture, the host of the home decoration show is painting, not hammering, but I still stand by it.

Then there are the captions. I work with the associate editor, Sean, on these. We do them on Tuesday, the closing day of the magazine, when things are at their most hectic, and yet I still find myself spending far too much time on this tiny part of the package. Last week we had a box reviewing a reality show Gone Country, in which celebrities try to become country singers. We had a picture of Dee Snider from Twisted Sister singing, and for hours I was distracted by the fact that I couldn’t come up with a pun for him. You look at this guy, so flamboyant in the ‘80s, so memorable for his crazy makeup, and think, “There’s gotta be a million ways to go!” And yet the band only had two hits, dammit: there were few options. Plus, I knew very little about country music, so that really pared down my pun possibilities. (Or “punsibilities” as only I call them.) Three hours later it finally hit me: “We’re Not Gonna Achy Break It.” This saved the world from my previous entry, “I Wanna Country.”

When searching for caption puns (or “capshpuns,” as I just punched myself in the face for calling them), I often stumble upon ones that I love, but would only work in a very specific situation…one that would never arise. For example, we had to do one for that Nickelodeon kids show, “The Naked Brothers,” about two brothers in a band. The picture we had was of the two brothers, posing together. I sighed, “If only they were gardening, then we could use “Naked Bro’s before hoes.” Yes, that would be delightful, but what are the odds of an episode being about them gardening? But I’m still keeping it in my back pocket in case there’s a Christmas episode next December: “Naked Bro’s before Ho, Ho, Hos.”

Incidentally, I know there are other Dee Snider puns out there, and it drives me crazy that I couldn't think of them. I welcome any input. It's purely theoretical now, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid exercise. Actually, it kind of does, but indulge me.