In snail mail from Chris Ambidge on Thursday, a print of this cartoon by Liz Climo:
(#1)
To get this cartoon, you need to know a good bit about the children’s book Charlotte’s Web — and then to appreciate how that sweet story is subverted by the taboo word asshole.
Today’s Bizarro:
This isn’t really a pun conveyed wordlessly — the caption “First sign of spring” is crucial to understanding the cartoon — but the pun is conveyed indirectly. For the cartoon to work, you have to recognize the figure behind the tree as Batman’s young sidekick Robin (named after Robin Hood, but given a red shirt to suggest the American robin’s red breast), and you need to know about the first robin as a sign of spring:
The Robin is considered a symbol of spring. A well-known example is a poem by Emily Dickinson, “I Dreaded That First Robin So”. Among other 19th-century poems about the first robin of spring is “The First Robin” by Dr. William H. Drummond, which according to the author’s wife is based on a Quebec superstition that whoever sees the first robin of spring will have good luck. (link)
From Victor Steinbok, this B.C. cartoon (from 4/16/13) by Johnny Hart:
This is intended to be a portmanteau both verbally and visually. Verbally, Mercedes-Benz overlapping with benzene. Visually, a combination of the symbol for the Mercedes-Benz company and a simplified version of the carbon ring structure for benzene.
I’m gripped by the story of the past day’s events in the Boston area, large portions of which are under lockdown as the search continues for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — suspected as being responsible, with his older brother Tamerlan (now dead), for the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday and the fatal shooting of an MIT policeman and the wounding of a transit policeman in an exchange of gunfire in Watertown MA last night. In the midst of this, occurrences of the portmanteau Marabomber ((Boston) Marathon + bomber), echoing the name Unabomber. And while I was listening to NPR coverage on KQED, there came a local feature from a naturalist about coyotes, with the portmanteaus coywolf and coydog (referring to coyote-wolf and coyote-dog hybrids, respectively).
Periodically I’ve posted the Bizarro Sunday Punnies, always a set of three pun panels. Last Sunday’s (#29) led with one that amused me a lot:
The title is a punning portmanteau: sturgeon (the fish) + Surgeon General (of the U.S.). The Surgeon General gives advice on matters of public health, and at least one SG has campaigned aggressively against cigarette smoking. So then we have the pun on smoking (cigarettes) and smoking ‘curing or preserving (food) by exposure to (wood) smoke’, a procedure often applied to sturgeon flesh.
… in the NYT (again). This was one where I wasn’t entirely sure what taboo item was being concealed by the euphemized pudendum boy.
That’s how the author is identified on the cover of this book, from the Lousy Book Covers site:
A remarkable choice of pseudonym — the American Founding Father Patrick Henry, of “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!’ fame.
From Stan Carey, this entertaining book cover:
This appears on the Lousy Book Covers site, the motto of which is
Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
But Stan was attracted to it because of the hero’s name.
Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:
(#1)
There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.
Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.
