For Saul Steinberg

… on the occasion of his birthday (6/15/14; he died in 1999), three cartoons that came my way this morning: a Zits, a Gary Larson, and a Bill Whitehead (new to this blog).

Steinberg. Illustrator, cartoonist, caricaturist, artist, social critic (with a Page on this blog). One specialty: language, thought, and reality. Six cartoons and New Yorker covers in this domain:

(#1)

The Stroop effect on the hoof. From Wikipedia:

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., “blue”, “green”, or “red”) is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word “red” printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who first published the effect in English in 1935.

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)
(#5)

(#6)

Zits. With the compound zoo-teen ‘teen (i.e. teenager) who serves as an intern at a zoo’:

(#7)

This is probably an unpaid internship, not a paid job: work in the world of millennials.

[Added 6/16: the follow-up:

(#7a)

(in which Jeremy gets the bad news about pay)]

Gary Larson. You know about book readings and poetry readings. Larson brings us cartoon readings:

(#8)

Bill Whitehead. And his Free Range Comics. Heavy on puns, as here:

(#9)

A pun on business ‘trade, commercial activity’ or ‘feces or urine’ (attested in this sense from 1632 in GDoS), with the second usage especially common with reference to dogs, in do s.o.’s business.

Two more punning cartoons from Whitehead:

(#9)

Pun on the noun change.

(#10)

Pun on the verb swing.

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