A recent accumulation: a Scott Hilburn strip with a pun; a Zits on X-free foods; a very meta Zippy; and a Pearls Before Swine with heavy use of implicature.
1. A groaner from Hilburn. (Hat tip to John Lawler.) The pun turns only on the feature of voicing (and then in word-final position , where the difference is phonetically slight in English):
(#1)
You might be a bit concerned that the female plants are advised to modesty (and concealment) in their presentations of self.
2. X-free foods. The Zits has Jeremy’s mother replacing all sorts of ingredients she takes to be problematic, thereby producing a very odd pizza order:
(#2)
Non-dairy “cheese” and kosher “bacon” are well attested (no doubt, gluten-free as well). Grass-fed chickens seem unproblematic, and I suspect that all mushrooms are cage-free. But the pizza sounds grotesquely X-free.
3. And the Zippy is absurdly meta, down to Zerbina being programmed to specific actions or feelings in particular panels:
(#3)
4. And the Pearls Before Swine refers to another strip, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes:
(#3)
Here, the cartoonist character (Stephan Pastis in real life) deploys implicature strategically to pick up a woman: in the events we see depicted, Pastis doesn’t actually say that he’s Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, but he leads her to believe that. And scores.
That was the situation on May 11th. More recently, Watterson (famously reclusive, and out of the cartooning business for some time) has appeared to do some panels of Pearls (in the guise of a little-girl guest cartoonist, Libby). See Luke O’Neil’s 6/7 posting “Calvin and Hobbes’ Bill Watterson Makes Surprise Return to Comic Strips”.
Leave a Reply