Passed on by Jeff Bowles on FB today, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2017:
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
May 30, 2020 at 4:11 pm |
Oh yes, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (not all of my readers are plugged into the details of American culture), a monument of American plain style writing as well as a politically significant text: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…”
May 30, 2020 at 7:49 pm |
Deck us all with Boston Charlie. There are several words for extended puns like this. One is “Anguish Languish”. An old one I haven’t been able to Google much about is “miser-o-gram”. Do you know any others?
May 31, 2020 at 2:13 am |
The standard technical term is burlesque.
May 31, 2020 at 7:09 am |
Maybe it’s just me, but I found this one rather less felicitous than most of Pastis’s efforts in this genre.