Self-referential cartooning

Today’s Zippy:

An illeistic meta-cartoon.

Ordinarily, reference to a cartoon from within the cartoon is managed via text with the proximal demonstrative this, coming from an outside narrator or from one of the characters in the cartoon: this cartoon does so and so. But here the self-reference is illeistic: the text refers to the cartoon by the cartoon’s own name — in this case “Nap” — just the way it refers to Andy Warhol’s tedious movie by its name, “Sleep”.

(On illeism, see my  7/29/07 Language Log posting “Illeism and its relatives”. With, for example, the example of Bob Dole referring to himself as “Bob Dole”.)

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