Nine words, no punctuation, no capital letters, and an office: Dave Bonta's "Funny business" hands the reader almost nothing to hold, which is why it rewards a slow look. On the surface it sketches a workplace where the morning has already given up, and where cleverness has stopped being a pleasure and become a trade. The central idea sits in the last line, "wit is a business", a claim that is bleakly funny and slightly sinister.
Start with the grammar, because the poem hides its meaning there. With no full stops, the words can be grouped in more than one way. "Office where / the morning quit" can be read as a complete thought: the morning resigned, like an employee walking out. Then "wit is a business" arrives as a second statement, so the sense runs on: in an office where the morning quit, wit is a business. But the words can also slide together as "the morning quit wit", with the morning abandoning cleverness altogether, leaving only the dry fact of "a business". The poem never says which reading is right. Judging by how it is built, that uncertainty seems deliberate, and the reader ends up doing a small piece of mental office work, sorting and filing words into sentences.
The personified morning is the poem's one real image, and a sharp one. Mornings usually promise something, a fresh start or a bit of energy. Here the morning "quit", as if it had been hired for the job and found it unbearable. The office swallows the day's first and best hours, and the poem suggests that whatever lightness or play might have lived there has gone with them. The word "office" is also left hanging at the start, with "where" stranded at the end of the first line. That small enjambment makes us lean into the next line, the way a day at work pulls you forward without asking.
The sound patterns are quiet but precise. "Quit" and "wit" form a perfect rhyme, and because one ends line two while the other opens line three, the rhyme jumps across the line break almost with no gap. It is a rhyme that tries to behave like an ordinary phrase. The effect is a neat click, like a punchline landing, and that suits a poem about wit. The short, clipped vowels of "quit", "wit", "is" and "business" give the whole thing a brisk, snapping rhythm, and the "s" sounds in "office", "is" and "business" run through it like the hiss of a photocopier. The lines also grow steadily: three syllables ("office where"), then four ("the morning quit"), then five ("wit is a business", counting "business" as two). It is a small staircase, and it makes the poem feel as if it builds toward its conclusion before the lid is snapped shut.
Then there is the title. "Funny business" is an idiom with two faces. "No funny business" warns against suspicious or dishonest dealings, while "funny" on its own means amusing. Bonta's last line pulls the two meanings apart and sets them to work. If wit is a business, then humour is something bought, sold and scheduled, and perhaps something slightly shady, a performance of cleverness rather than the real thing. The idiom also hints at the kind of office joke that exists to keep a mood up, not to say anything true. Read this way, the title is not a label for the poem but part of its argument, completed by the final line.
What makes the poem significant is how neatly it does what it describes. It is witty, a compact joke built from a rhyme, a pun and a double-edged idiom, yet it is about the death of wit under office conditions. The poem is therefore both evidence and complaint, and it seems to know it. It also shows how much a very short piece of writing can carry when every word has to do two jobs. A longer poem might lecture about work draining the life out of language and play. This one makes the point in the time it takes to read it, then leaves the reader with the faint, uncomfortable sense that the joke might be on anyone who laughs.