.Yesterday’s Bizarro, and a Liam Walsh cartoon from the May 30th New Yorker:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s one in this strip — see this Page.)
(#2)
Pre-Columbian coffee. The ingredients: the big advertising campaign for 100% Colombian coffee — coffee from Colombia, named (in Spanish) for Christopher Columbus — and pre-Columbian artifacts, from the time before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World (and the ensuing Spanish Conquest).
The logo for Colombian coffee, featuring Juan Valdez:
(#2)
From Wikipedia:
Juan Valdez is a fictional character who has appeared in advertisements for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia since 1958 [almost 50 years ago!], representing a Colombian coffee farmer. The advertisements were designed by the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency, with the goal of distinguishing 100%-Colombian coffee from coffee blended with beans from other countries. He typically appears with his mule Conchita, carrying sacks of harvested coffee beans. He has become an icon for Colombia as well as coffee in general, and Juan Valdez’s iconic appearance is frequently mimicked or parodied in television and other media.
Buying a fowl. The ingredients:: the US tv game Wheel of Fortune (discussed in connection with #2 in a 6/19/14 posting), based roughly on the Hangman game, in the course of which contestants can buy a vowel (letter), and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, in which several of the hieroglyphs are drawings of birds, that is, fowl(s). In #2 we see an ancient Egyptian version of Wheel of Fortune.
Both cartoons depend not only on puns — Colombian / Columbian, vowel / fowl — but also on absurd juxtapositions of real-life situations: Colombian coffee and pre-Columbian artifacts (who would make coffee from pre-Columbian artifacts?), a tv show (Wheel of Fortune) set in ancient Egypt.
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