On (US) Memorial Day Eve, this Dan Thompson Brevity cartoon passed on by Betsy Herrington on Facebook:
(#1)
A distant pun, with the original and the pun differing both segmentally and prosodically, but all that is surmounted if you know the original: Humphrey Bogart (caricatured in #1, in trenchcoat and fedora) to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: “Here’s looking at you, kid”.
From a cartoon website on Thompson:
Dan Thompson instructor illustrator comic book artist cartoonist: Dan Thompson has always loved adventure-themed stories, having grown up watching Hanna-Barbera’s The Adventures of Jonny Quest and GI Joe episodes. A fan of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes as well as James Bond films, Thompson began his professional career doing character design and animation for FunnyBone Interactive, part of Vivendi Universal, then moved into freelance cartoon illustration and gag cartooning. A member of the National Cartoonists Society, he writes and draws cartoons for magazines, greeting cards, comic books and Web sites. A New England native, Thompson was born and raised in Lowell, Mass. He makes his home now in Graham, North Carolina, with his wife and sons.
Dan Thompson is the creator of syndicated comic strip Rip Haywire as well as the single panel comic Brevity, the comic Lost Sheep and the children’s puzzle strip Kidspot.
On Brevity, from Wikipedia:
Brevity is a single-panel newspaper comic strip created by Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry, and currently drawn by Dan Thompson. Brevity originally began on Comics Sherpa (a site which helps beginning comic strips make their work public over the web). It debuted in 55 newspapers on January 3, 2005.
Thompson is given to language play. Here’s another complex pun:
(#2)
To get this you need to know two things. Thing 1, from Wikipedia:
“Hasta la vista, baby” is a catchphrase associated with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s title character from the 1991 science fiction thriller film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
(with Spanish Hasta la vista conveying ‘See you later’, ‘Goodbye’)
Thing 2, also from Wikipedia:
Hosta (… syn. Funkia) is a genus of plants commonly known as hostas, plantain lilies (particularly in Britain) and occasionally by the Japanese name giboshi. Hostas are widely cultivated as shade-tolerant foliage plants. The genus is currently placed in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Agavoideae, and is native to northeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and the Russian Far East).
A lovely plant (though not a shrub, despite the cartoon), with a huge range of foliage colors:
(#3)
and sweet pendulous flowers:
(#4)
The name hosta and an Anglicized pronunciation of Spanish hasta are homophones, so the most significant difference between the original and the pun is baby / maybe.
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