Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Currently viral on the net, this punning Humpty Dumpty cartoon:

(#1)

The noun fall ‘act of falling or collapsing’ vs. (North American) ‘autumn’, with a corresponding accompanying ambiguity in the adjective great: ‘very large’ vs. ‘of considerably high quality’.

(Hat tip to Mike Pope.)

No doubt the pun has been made before, but here it’s paired with a drawing, and a large part of the attraction of the cartoon is its charming graphic style — clean lines, intense colors, schematic but attentive to detail.

The artist uses the name @WholesomeNsuch on Twitter; on the tweet with this cartoon, a photo and a comment:

(#2) “I had no idea that my comic would go viral but here we are 👌I do commissioned artwork as well hmu”

Humpty Dumpty on this blog (with discussions of the nursery rhyme and the character’s appearance in Alice):

on 11/30/15 in “Rhyme or reason”

on 7/8/17 in “Words on a wall”

on 8/21/18 in “More bedevilment”

This entry was posted on October 5, 2018 at 7:19 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Puns. 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.