Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Wayno/Piraro collab on a meta-Bizarro strip:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Cartoon memes for sale: Grim Reaper, Desert Island, Psychiatrist. All old acquaintances on this blog (see the Page on Comic conventions).

Mister Laffee (dispensing laugh fodder) is a straightforward take-off on Mister Softee (dispensing soft serve); not everyone will get the joke, because Mister Softee dispenses his soft sweet cold goodies mostly in the northeastern US.

The bare facts on Mister Softee, from Wikipedia:

(#2) A Mister Softee truck, complete with the company’s ridiculous logo (a grinning wafer-style ice cream cone)

Mister Softee is an American ice cream truck franchisor, best known in the northeastern United States.

Mister Softee was founded by William Conway and James Conway (October 30, 1927 – May 28, 2006) in 1956 in Philadelphia and is one of the largest franchisors of soft ice cream in the United States, with about 350 franchisees operating 600 trucks in 15 states.

As of 2016, the company was headquartered in Runnemede, New Jersey, and was still run by the Conway family, co-owned by cousins Jim Conway Jr. and John Conway.

… The instrumental jingle played by Mister Softee trucks is based on “The Whistler and His Dog” (1960) by Lester Morton “Les” Waas. A copy of the sheet music and all the words can be found on the Mister Softee website. Waas, who created close to 1,000 jingles in his lifetime, died in April 2016. In New York City, the trucks are permitted to only play the jingle while moving, to reduce noise.

(#3) The accursed jingle

Earlier on this blog, on the two main ingredients of this posting:

— in my 6/20/15 posting “Screaming for ice cream”, on ice cream trucks;

— and from my 12/21/12 posting “Soft serve”, on soft serve (from Carvel and Dairy Queen):

in ordinary English, ice cream covers a variety of frozen confections — but in the United States, the label is regulated, so that, technically, soft serve is not ice cream.

Soft serve differs from (prototypical) ice cream in three ways: it is lower in milk fat; it is produced at a substantially lower temperature; and it (usually) contains significant amounts of air, introduced at the time of freezing. And it’s now become a regular feature of the American pop-food landscape.

This entry was posted on June 10, 2019 at 8:01 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Music, 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.