«
»

Tones

Passed on by David Beaver, a Bizarro from 2007:

One pun in the cartoon proper, another in the title.

The speaker’s words in the cartoon play on two senses of tone: (1) musical quality (appropriate for a choir), (2) ‘modulation of the voice expressing a particular feeling or mood’ (NOAD2), as in tone of voice (the usual sense in “I don’t like your tone”).

The title plays on the movie title Shootout at the OK Corral, with chorale (the choir context again) for corral. This is a perfect pun for me, but some have /o/ rather than /ǝ/ in the first syllable of chorale, and some have /a/ rather than /æ/ in the second syllable of that word.

Both puns juxtapose the choir world to the cowboy world.

This entry was posted on September 10, 2012 at 9:34 am and is filed under Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Tones”

  1. Chris Says:
    September 10, 2012 at 1:38 pm | Reply

    Then again, Peter Schickele wrote the OK Chorale (duet for four handed organ) a while back. Perhaps Piraro is a fan.

  2. Robert Says:
    September 10, 2012 at 5:08 pm | Reply

    The pun is perfect for me, too, but my first syllable is more like /ɔ/ than /ǝ/ in both cases.

Leave a Reply

%d