A Pun You Can’t Hear
The Victorian Liberals have a new TV ad. The words on screen say, “BEN there for every Labor failure.”
The narrator says “been there.”
So the ad can’t even agree with itself. The screen makes a pun, and the voice reading it out quietly drops it.
The phonetics explain why. In Australian English, “Ben” has the vowel you hear in “pen”. “Been”, said carefully, has the vowel in “bean”. Said quickly, the way most of us actually say it, it drifts towards “bin”. Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe’s standard description of Australian English treats those as three separate vowels. They’re three different sounds, and none of them matches. So there’s no pun, just a spelling joke that falls apart the moment someone says it out loud. Even the voice artist didn’t try to make it work.
The annoying part is that there’s a real argument underneath. Ben Carroll has been a senior minister for most of Labor’s time in office, and Deputy Premier for the most recent stretch. Is a new face at the top really a new direction, or the same government with different photos? That’s a fair question for voters to weigh. “Carroll was there for all of it” makes that case cleanly, with nothing to decode.
The gimmick fails even on its own terms. There’s good evidence that catchy phrasing makes claims feel truer. In 2000, Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh found that people rate rhyming sayings as more accurate than the same idea in plain words. “Woes unite foes” beats “woes unite enemies”. Psychologists call it the rhyme-as-reason effect. But it depends on sound. The ear does the persuading. A pun you can’t hear gets none of the benefit.
And the broader strategy doesn’t have much going for it either. In 2007, Richard Lau, Lee Sigelman and Ivy Brown Rovner pulled together 111 studies of negative campaigning. They found no reliable evidence that attack ads win more votes, and some evidence that they wear down trust in politics generally. Meanwhile, the people who enjoy a clever dig at the other side are the people who were already going to vote for you.
Every side does this. Puns, nicknames, meme tiles, a three-word slogan in a bold font. It all plays well inside the campaign office and the party’s own social feeds. It’s preaching to the choir. Meanwhile, the swing voters who’ll actually choose the next government hear an ad that doesn’t make sense, and lose a little more patience with the whole business. No wonder so many people are sick of politicians and the people who write their ads.
The lesson goes well beyond politics. Spoken language came long before writing, for the species and for every child who learns to talk. Ads are heard, speeches are heard, and even the slogans people repeat to each other are heard. If your message only works on the page, it doesn’t work.
