For Sunday, three Bizarro puns, from the outrageous to the subtle. All drawn by Don Piraro, but using joke ideas from Clifford Harris (an M.D. who’s faculty liaison for development at the Stanford Medical Center when he’s not supplying cartoon ideas to Piraro). The most outrageous, a triple play of imperfect puns:
Groan. Like most outrageous puns, this one depends on the audience knowing a formulaic expression — in this case, No Shirt No Shoes No Service — that can then be departed from phonologically as well as semantically. This one plays entertainingly on the /ʃ/ – /s/ relationship by switching the segments.
This one has a perfect pun; it turns entirely on the ambiguity of /pis/.
Finally, a gentle play on two uses of good: good vs. evil and good in the polite offer-declining formula I’m good (or I’m fine), conveying ‘No thank you; I’m satisfied with things as they are’ (a usage that drives some people up the wall, perhaps because it’s become popular relatively recently — a matter of a few decades, I think, though that’s hard to verify via searches, since this use of the expression is hard to track).
October 16, 2011 at 10:12 am |
Oddly, I didn’t even get the first one until it is explained. Perhaps be cause Sioux and Sherpas are a little more modified than Certs.
October 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm |
In the first Bizarro, the sign reverses the more convoluted meaning of the original. In Bizarro cafe, the sign indicates that Certs, Sioux, and sherpas are all unavailable or forbidden (just which is unclear). In the original, however, patrons are given to understand that if they lack a shirt or shoes, they will not be given service. If this structure had been maintained, the customer would have explained that he did not have any breath mints or native Americans, and the server would have responded that, under the circumstances, he could not have any Himalayan mountain guides.
October 16, 2011 at 3:28 pm |
Nice point: the cartoon doesn’t preserve the pragmatics of the original.
October 23, 2011 at 8:08 am |
[…] Today’s Bizarro, another cartoon idea from Cliff Harris: […]