Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Following on a Zippy and a Mother Goose and Grimm, the day continues with three more cartoons: a Bizarro with sluggish portmanteaus (and a pop culture allusion); a Pearls Before Swine with a preposterous elaborate pun; and a Dilbert on expectations about conversational interactions.

(#1)

The allusion is to the monster film Mothra vs. Godzilla, with King Kong replacing Godzilla in a contest with Mothra. That enables Don Piraro to locate the confrontation on the Empire State Building,.

Piraro also chose to replace the giant moth and the giant gorilla with notably slow-moving creatures, a sloth and a panda, respectively, so that the confrontation becomes absurd (and terminally boring).

And then he combined the names: sloth plus Mothra gives Slothra, panda plus King Kong gives Panda Kong.

(#2)

In the spirit of the Pearls strip in “Return to Oz”, Pastis has the characters build to an elaborate outrageous pun of the “immortal porpoises” type — this time on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, from the 1964 film version of Mary Poppins. And then, as in that earlier strip and some others, things go meta as Rat confronts the cartoonist and threatens him for his misdeed.

(#3)

The boss’s expectation of group conversational interaction (like a conference call) is that it will lead to a mutually agreed-on result, but Dilbert’s expectations are much, much lower than that.

This entry was posted on August 4, 2013 at 8:19 am and is filed under Conversation, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Portmanteaus, Pragmatics, 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.