Arnold Zwicky's Blog

First encountered on Pinterest this morning, what is apparently a new rage in texties: jokes told by a cute husky pup (rather than, say, a llama, a penguin, an eel, or Ryan Gosling), for example this one:

(#1)

(Texty is my name for things that combine the features of slogans — as on e-cards — and cartoons; they are essentially joke delivery systems supplied with some visual background. When the visual background is a fixed image, re-used on many occasions, with a creature or person presented as telling the joke, then the custom has become for the texties to be referred to as meme. In this case, the (cute) husky pup meme. The jokes can be of any sort; many of them are hoary japes rather than fresh cleverness.)

Before I say more about the texty in #1, notes about the actual joke (which was new to me, but probably not to the world). Getting the joke depends on your knowing the Swiss flag:

(#2)

(An especially simply flag design, also one of only two official flags for a nation-state that’s square, rather than rectangular, in shape.)

Once you’ve got #2, you’ll recognize the white cross as a plus sign, which will lead you to another use of the noun plus. From NOAD2:

an advantage: knowing the language is a decided plus

And a big plus is even more of an advantage than just a plus.

Back to #1. From one of many sites spreading cute husky cubs, Dose of Funny, deliriously maintaining that “15 Pun Husky Meme Jokes are Insanely Cute”:

The pun husky meme is one of the best memes to be created in the last year. It’s simple, it takes three photos of an adorable husky pup who is playing with his little husky toy … The first [panel] is him talking, then the second photo is the punch line, and the last photo is the kicker of the little husky pup laughing at the joke… Once you see it, you’ll know why the hilariously cute pun husky meme is just the best of them all. The basic premise is you can tell any sort of corny (but still funny!) joke and if you have it coming from an adorable husky, then it’s not corny anymore, but it’s super cute. Sort of like the lame joke eel, but much, much cuter.

It’s all in the cuteness. Husky pups beat joke eels hands down. Here’s the eel doing racy jokes:

(#3)

(#4)

The joke eel excels at snarkily sophomoric, but the husky cub has the market on cute cornered.

This entry was posted on March 10, 2017 at 7:11 am and is filed under Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signs and symbols. 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.