Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Two cartoons from the December 7th New Yorker, by Jason Adam Katzenstein and Christopher Weyant (both of whom have appeared on this blog before):

(#1)

(#2)

Good doggie. In the Katzenstein, you have to buy the premise that the dog is driving the car (but surely the dog has no driver’s license! and how does it manage this feat without opposable thumbs?). The cop is shaking the paw the dog has offering — “shaking hands” being a trick people teach to dogs — and praising the dog enthusiastically, in the “Good doggie!” register, akin to the register people use to young children, involving (among other things) raised pitch and exaggerated pitch shifts.

Bonsai lawn maintenance. In the Weyant,  the bonsai tree has apparently dropped its leaves (actual bonsai trees don’t do this), so the guy in the cartoon is raking the fallen leaves up with a bonsai rake and putting them in bonsai bags. Another descent into a miniature world, like the one in the Bizarro cartoon I posted about on November 11th, where the miniaturization extended to human figures:

The conceit here is that there is a miniature world mirroring the normal-sized world, with bonsai lumberjacks chopping down bonsai trees and, presumably much else besides: bonsai police to confront bonsai vandals, for instance.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2015 at 6:37 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics. 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.