Victor Contoski, a recently retired English professor at Kansas University, was known among the department's faculty and staff for his sense of humor. Now that he's gone his humor is missed.

There’s a noticeable shortage of lame puns these days in the Kansas University English department in Wescoe Hall.

That’s because Victor Contoski isn’t there anymore.

Contoski, 70, who went into partial retirement this semester, spent decades peppering colleagues with jokes about cannibals, clowns, cows, insects – any subject matter that could yield a play on words.

Each morning, he’d try out new material on faculty members who came in early to get first dibs on the department’s copier. By the afternoon, the joke would work its way around the rest of the department.

A typical Contoski joke: Where do you get dragon milk? From cows with short legs.

“The idea of puns is that everybody groans and says ‘That’s awful,’ but it also shows people that I’m not a threat to them,” Contoski said.

Contoski came to KU in 1969 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He taught creative writing, poetry and American literature. Instead of having students write term papers, he had them create their own interpretation of one of the works covered during the semester and present it to the class in any format they wanted.

One semester, a group of students served a Puritan dinner. Then there was the male student who performed a strip-tease inspired by Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

“You write a term paper, and only the professor knows what you say,” he said of why he wanted students to share their work.

Along the way, he kept colleagues in good humor. Jim Carothers, who shared an office in Carruth-O’Leary Hall with Contoski in the early 1970s, remembers the time Contoski left him a note that said the housekeeping staff had been complaining about Carothers’ messy desk. He signed the note with the name of the department head.

Contoski liked to joke that he was in love with a married woman: his wife, Wieslawa, whom he met in the 1950s while studying in Poland. After a series of health problems, she died in 1998 at age 63.

Contoski said that after Wieslawa’s death he went into shock. But then he became infused with a mysterious sense of joy.

“Either I have gone completely insane, or this is some kind of mystical experience,” he said.

Since then, he’s developed an interest in spiritual matters and the concept that thoughts can have an effect on the physical world. In 2005, he went with a group of fellow seekers to Las Vegas – not to gamble, but to try to influence dice with mental energy.

Recently, he’s begun teaching a course in his home on “spiritual awakening.”

“I’ve become sort of Victor squared,” he said. “I have so much internal joy it’s just bubbling over. I know that we will always be with those that we love. It’s not a belief. I know it.”

He will stay on the payroll until the end of the semester, but he doesn’t come into Wescoe regularly, in large part because he’s given up his treasured parking pass. His office – which for years featured a sign that read “Flogging will continue until morale improves” – is now occupied by Paul Lim.

“Victor is never caught with his puns down,” Lim said.

To make up for Contoski’s absence, Lim has been posting a new bad joke on his door each week. This week’s involved an invisible man who married an invisible woman. (Their kids were nothing to look at, either.)

“I thought I would inherit wonderful vibes in this office because he’s such a jokester,” Lim said. “People pop in and they say, ‘What’s the joke of the day?'”