Ya gotta know the matryoshkas

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:

Another note on what it takes to understand the cartoon and to see what’s funny about it.

As with a previous cartoon on a similar subject (in my 12/12/15 posting “Russian dolls”), you really need to know about matryoshkas.

Then of course you need to recognize the camping equipment in the cartoon: the cooking pot; the bear bag, for hanging food from a tree limb, out of the reach of bears (note the complex interpretation of the N + N compound); and the slop bucket / chamber pot.

Then you need to appreciate that the top halves of the three smallest matryoshkas are being used as these pieces of camping equiment — so that the figures in the cartoon are being treated simultaneously as women and girls (who can go on a camping trip) and also as hollow material objects for utilitarian purposes.

(The cooking pot presents an interesting challenge. Matryoshkas are usually made of wood, so they couldn’t possibly be used to cook things over a fire. I suppose we’ll have to imagine that these are metal or ceramic dolls.)

One Response to “Ya gotta know the matryoshkas”

  1. arnold zwicky Says:

    On the title of this posting, an allusion that was caught by readers who are fans of musical comedy or librarians or both: to the line “You gotta know the territory” from “Rock Island”, the opening number (with salesmen on the train to River City IA) in the musical The Music Man (you can watch the scene from the 1962 movie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ9U4Cbb4wg
    Librarians are relevant because the main female character is Marian (the librarian).

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