Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zippy:

The strip is a lead-in to a pun so dreadful — the Holy Grill for the Holy Grail — that it’s wonderful. Then there’s the taco sauce theme and the snowlone let the X commence in the title.

Zippy taco sauce on this blog: a strip of 6/11/12 that led to a posting on La Victoria products. From 2003, Zippy with kim chee and taco sauce:

Then in 2007 there was a run on taco sauce strips. From 2/4/07, a particularly silly one with a Disney crossover:

“It’ll be like taking Pop-Tarts from a Pinhead”: nice simile.

Then from 3/25/07, the food theme continues with taco sauce in scooped-out Ho-Hos:

From 9/23/07, Ding Dongs and taco sauce as the only products at the big box store D.D.’s T.S. Outlet:

And then from 10/14/07, more Hostess treats, plus All-You-Can-Swig Taco Sauce-oriums (note playful morphology in sauce-orium):

There have been more taco sauce strips since then (like the one on 6/11/12 linked to above), but they apparently haven’t been indexed yet on the Zippy site.

On to the title, “Let the Wailing Commence”. The template let the X commence is instantiated with huge numbers of different Xs. Just from the first two pages from Google search:

X = games, war, battle, festivities, competition, madness, shenanigans, beat, Easter Egg hunt, shipping, hate, party, feasting, randomness

And from New Yorker cartoonist Mischa Richter:

On Richter, who had an interesting life history:

Mischa Richter (1910 – March 23, 2001) was an American cartoonist best known for his numerous cartoons published in The New Yorker over decades.

Richter was born in Kharkov, Russia, where his father was the city’s Commissar of Waterworks. Young Mischa learned drawing from art tutors and went on family vacations to Berdyansk. After his uncle joined the Red Army and was killed in 1917, his parents decided to flee the Revolution. Traveling by train to the Polish border, they went by cart through the forest and then in a rowboat into Poland. Mischa continued his art training while they spent a year waiting for a visa. They arrived in the United States in 1922 when he was 11 years old. Studying at Boston’s Museum School, he became friends with Will Barnet. In 1934, Richter graduated from Yale and returned to Boston where he was a WPA muralist. (link)

 

This entry was posted on April 4, 2013 at 7:11 am and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Playful morphology, Puns, Simile, Snowclones. 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.