In the world of annually recurring dates, Wednesday was Earth Day, Thursday was St. George’s Day, and tomorrow is World Penguin Day. Into this olla podrida of holidays walk a pastor, a priest, a rabbi, and a pie-throwing clown working as an erotic masseur.
Colby Jones, cartooning as Sir Colby, with a meta Walk Into Bar joke; and Bob Eckstein, offering the comic amalgam of clown and masseur.
Meta Walk Into Bar. From Sir Colby:
(#1) You need to know about Walk Into Bar jokes; and then appreciate the pun on bar; it’s a joke about a joke
The pun, based on these two senses of bar, from NOAD:
noun bar: 1 a long rod or rigid piece of wood, metal, or similar material, typically used as an obstruction, fastening, or weapon. … 2 … [c] an establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served.
About the general joke form, which I called Walk Into Bar in my 8/13/17 posting “Reduced coordination, joke memes, and sociocultural categories”:
The only requirement is the set-up, which has one, two, or three characters (the bar-goers) going into a bar (mostly commonly the verb used is walk, in the jocular simple present tense, though go and other verbs of motion are possible, as is the simple past tense); sometimes the set-up specifies more about the bar-goers — what they look like, what they have with them — or about the bar and its location. The follow-up typically involves conversational exchanges between the bar-goers and the bartender or other patrons of the bar, or else a series of actions on the part of the bar-goers, these exchanges or actions incorporating a pay-off joke.
Examples follow in that posting. And then a lovely variant, in my 2/26 posting “A priest, a rabbit, and a minister”.
(On the artist, Colby Jones, drawing as Sir Colby, see his website.)
The clown masseur. From Bob Eckstein on Facebook today:
(#2) A wonderful hybrid: pieing as a comedic routine × the happy ending to an erotic massage (note the attention to the background scenery)
To see what this cartoon is about, and to appreciate why it’s funny, you need to know both conventional parts. Bob’s genius here is then to juxtapose them, along with the word play funny ending vs. happy ending.
On the first part, two postings on this blog:
— on 4/10/18, in “Two cartoons from friends”, a section on pieing as a social practice and as a comedic routine
— on 6/18/19, in “The clown facial”, on (among other things),
the N + N compound clown facial (for a pieing — a pie-in-the-face — involving a clown or clowns)
with a section on clown facials.
On the second part, from my 6/26/15 posting “Happy Ending”:
This sexual (but semi-euphemistic) and very context-specific sense of happy ending (referring to the ending of a massage session that provides happiness by giving the customer sexual release) competes with a more literal (and more general) sense of the expression (referring to the ending of an event or a story that is fortunate, usually by providing happiness to the participants — they lived happily ever after, as the saying goes)
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