Gandhi was a super callused fragile mystic vexed by halitosis.

Is that a pun? It's certainly wordplay of the kind you risk in company only when you have already established your intellectual bona fides or if everyone is as drunk as or, preferably, drunker than you.

And if you choose to risk it whatever the circumstances, you should mumble, while waving your hand and turning your head away. If someone chooses to laugh, laugh back, not with them but at them.

Or if you are a columnist, bury the easy, mindless jape deep deep down well beyond the point at which those with duties and responsibilities have stopped reading.

Thus, in today's Chronicle, in a parenthetical comment at the end of his 11th paragraph, David Kipen refers to:

David Rensin, co-author of Tim Allen's "Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man." (Does this make Rensin the Boswell to Tim Allen's johnson?)

I got it, Mr. Interlocuter said. I don't want it, but I got it.