From Puns on the Streets, to Puns in the Classroom

Mexico – Lourdes Ruiz comes dressed in an apron, on time for the first of four sessions that make up the Diploma in Fine Double Entendre at the José Maria Velasco Gallery in Mexico City. One hundred students have been looking forward for it for a while because “there is no one better” than “The Masked Purslane” to teach the art of “double entendre ” that is, the mental agility to win sexual battles only with language.

“Here we will risk the neck by hand,” he says when he begins to speak with his powerful tenor voice that thunders among young intellectuals, housewives, demanding seventy-year old adults, girls from private school, bureaucrats and mothers with children who take the class sitting in chairs, mattresses and even standing because the assembly exceeded expectations.

“Tepito (the tough neighborhood where the course is held) welcomes them with open arms … and you’ll figure it out what to do with the legs.”

Students burst out in a roar of laughter. “Here I give you a pen,” shouts a man’s voice playing along with it: “you come to class” to sharpen the mind.

“He who does not know how to play double entendre, has to pay a tax for his ingenuity,” says Alfonso Hernandez from a corner. Hernandez is a historian from the Tepiteños Studies Center and adjunct professor at the program. And what is the price? “The price is embarrassment.”

It was suffered by a lady who complained about the shrill cries of her husband’s friends while watching a soccer game. “Prescribe him white smoke tea,” advised the men to her husband. She listened and she went to the market to ask for the “yerba white smoke” the next day. All the merchants laughed, are you looking for sperm? One of them asked. The next day, she enrolled in the class.

“The double entendre is not for common, rude people; it is not true: it is a mental chess where you have to be prepared,” Lourdes tries again when recommending readings Carlos Monsivais, Ibarguengoitia, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (yes, she played double entendre: ” do not loosen the tamale even if they pull the leaves”); music (Chava Flores); film (Charles Chaplin).

Lourdes Ruiz was born in Tepito in 1971 and has never moved away from her stand of children’s clothes from where she shouts “what size, what size fits all”, to promote her culture.

She did so when the government of Mexico City invited residents to expose the bright side of the dangerous neighborhood and she went to show a sample of her “double entendre.” She convinced the National Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Public Education to endorse and provide a space for free classes nine years ago.

For now, she is comfortable with this space, but she wants to go further: “If you teach double entendre in elementary schools in Mexico, it would be a potential in math, physics, chemistry (some laugh). Seriously, it requires a lot of mental retention,” she says.

Want more tips? … Eat almonds.

Out of a sack – one of the students asks using double entendre.

Not out of sack, but out of a small bag – said the historian. And try to fit a large papaya and a knife to chop it because the papaya that is not used gets spoiled.

People in the gallery burst out in a roar of laughter.

At that time, Lourdes has given away a class activity: the “completely soaked” crossword. The students have to find the words “paco”, “gerte”, “stick”, and “consumption”. Finally, they should read aloud the meaning extracted out of the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary: each word needs to have an absolutely double meaning. For example, Paco: Silver mineral silver with a ferruginous matrix.

– You see? You are not going to die of cancer: cancer only attacks those who do not laugh, says Lourdes before saying good bye and asking for a double entendre rehearsal.