Peace Through Buttons

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The Toledo City Paper published the below article about Top Pun, in an edition entitled, "“This is what democracy looks like: City Paper marches for peace in Washington, D.C."

by Ryan Bunch

published February 7th 2007

Boys just wanna have pun

Dan Rutt spreads peace through buttons at TopPun.com

Don’t laugh, it’s not punny — Dan Rutt earns his livelihood from puns. With a simple two-word mission statement that reads “Maximizing Prophets,” Rutt is taking the oft-too serious left-wing agenda and lightening the mood, describing his love of the pun as ‘spiritual jujitsu.’

“I think that life is full of paradoxes, and I think that sometimes handling things straight on is hard for people to deal with. But when you have humor and double and triple takes on things, it kind of lightens it up and offers a different perspective in a more safe manner and in a more fun way. If life isn’t fun and playful, then it really isn’t much of anything. Joy is the currency of life,” says Rutt.

Born in Haiti to a doctor father and nurse mother (Rutt describes them as “medical missionaries”), the pun expert has lived in Toledo for 20 years and spent most of that time working in public health.

Personally, Rutt is warm and kind, with an animated, excitable voice motivated by his love for twisting words and phrases. But his mission is grounded in seriousness. “I think it’s very important to be very serious about important issues, but if it grinds you into the ground, I say give it up and do something different,” he says. Here, Rutt speaks more about his life than funny slogans on buttons.

“I’m a terrible punster and I’ve been working for peace and justice my whole adult life. The two just met,” he says about the forging of his career, “I was working a nice, cushy government job, but found that I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Eventually, I decided to move to part-time, until about three years ago, when I quit completely. I had already bought the domain name (www.TopPun.com) and was doing it as a hobby. I just kind of figured that since I’m the best punster for peace in the English-speaking world, that maybe that’s what I should do!” It was one of the best moves he ever made.

“I don’t make a lot of money,” he says, “but when I quit my ‘regular’ job, I found that my quality of life sky-rocketed.” Choosing to move his hobby to the “smallest level of small business possible,” Rutt says he’s discovered his inner “Jack-of-all-trades.” “It’s a lot of work, and that’s one of the things I like about it. I don’t consider myself primarily an artist though, because I have to do all my own Web design, graphics design, come up with the ideas and produce all my own products, like stamping buttons and imprinting T-shirts,” he says.

So what does the Top Pun do? “I basically do peace and justice stuff, specializing in word plays, and I offer my own designs of about 15 different products. I have the world’s largest peace sign collection, a huge anti-Bush collection, anti-war stuff, that kind of thing,” he says.

At Rutt’s Web site, www.TopPun.com, you can find an array of wacky and serious items from buttons to T-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers, posters and more, bearing a slew of his slogans, including the “standards,” such as “The pun is mightier than the sword,” “Just due it,” and “Justice is no yoke.” But you can personalize your items, too, plus learn all sorts of fun facts about Rutt and his hobby-cum-business.

Browse Top Pun's Peace Buttons