In this text, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument - that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it - while he discusses puns, cross-words, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, and scat singing.