Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s  Mary, Queen of Scots, not-dead-yet cartoon (I’m alive!): today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:

(#1) The two ingredients of this preposterous pun: It’s alive! and endive (punning on alive)

From my 1/20/23 posting “Adventures in cartoon understanding: Victor alignment”:

(#2)

The cartoon’s set in a garage — Frankenstein Tire & Auto Service, whose name makes explicit some connection to Mary Shelley’s novel or to one of the two canonical films derived from it (James Whale’s 1931 drama, Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein) — with an outrageous pun in It’s aligned! connecting the work of a tire and auto service — wheel alignment being one of its major services– to the films, via Victor Frankenstein’s crying out It’s alive! in deranged joy in the films.

Then the endive — English [ˈɛnˌdajv], French [ˌãˈdiv], from NOAD:

(#3) (Belgian) endive

noun endive: 1 British an edible Mediterranean [AZ: chicory] plant whose bitter leaves may be blanched and used in salads. Cichorium endivia, family Compositae (including both curly-leaved and smooth-leaved varieties). 2 (also Belgian endive) North American a young, typically blanched chicory plant, eaten as a cooked vegetable or in salads.

The new Bizarro (#1) has another version of the deranged Victor Frankenstein, a Belgian endive on the lab table, and Victor’s assistant Igor wielding the culture objects of salad-making  — salad tongs and a salad bowl — plus an absolute festival of Dan Piraro’s symbols (Dan says there are 12 in this cartoon).

This entry was posted on May 21, 2023 at 4:39 am and is filed under Books, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Parody, 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.