Arnold Zwicky's Blog

An accidental find in preparing yesterday’s posting on Ray Troll’s 2011 political cartoon “Octopi Wall Street”: a whole vein of Ray Troll fish art, most of it silly or raunchy, full of bad puns and surprising references to fish (“The Da Vinci Cod”, featuring the Mona Lisa with a fish). Four examples from a great many…

Appropriate for this holiday season, in particular for Epiphany:

(#1) The piscine royals (you don’t often see fish riding camels)

An outrageous pun on the verbs sin /sɪn/ (drawing on the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church) and seine /sɛn/ (drawing on the practices of fisherfolk):

(#2)

Another pun, on two senses of dive:

(#3) A sleazy bar that is reached by plunging into the water, so that it’s a dive bar in two senses at once

From NOAD:

noun dive: 1a plunge head first into water: he hit the sea in a shallow dive | a high dive.

… 3(also dive bar) informal a shabby or sleazy bar or similar establishment: he got into a fight in some dive | a detective story set in the smoky clubs and dive bars of 1940s Los Angeles.

And then an evolution joke using rhyme:

(#4)

This entry was posted on December 15, 2020 at 10:20 am and is filed under Art, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and culture, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme. 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.