Now for a joke type that isn’t pun-based. Instead, like snowclones, these jokes are based on formulaic expressions, and involve replacing items in the formulas by (semantically) analogous items; they are analogical extensions of the formulas. One popped up in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) To understand this cartoon, you have to retrieve the conventionalized N + N compound dog whistle, the basis for dog tuba (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
From NOAD:
(compound) noun dog whistle: [a] a high-pitched whistle used to train dogs, typically having a sound inaudible to humans. [b] [usually as modifier] a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group: dog-whistle issues such as immigration and crime.
It’s sense a that’s relevant to #1, which shows a guy playing a tuba at a high pitch humans can’t hear (note that the other guy is struggling to hear anything at all) but dogs can (note the dog stopping up its ears in pain). So: the dog is experiencing not a dog whistle, but (preposterously) a dog tuba.
There’s no customary name for analogical extensions of fixed expressions as a joke form. In a bow to Wayno and Dan, I propose to call them dog tubas. Here’s another Bizarro turning on a dog tuba, from my 8/17/22 posting “Knuckle macaroni” (with the dog tuba in the title!):
(#2)
what if you want a pasta that’s smaller, shorter than elbows, but similar in shape? Little elbows — elbowettes or cubitelli (Lat. cubitum ‘elbow’) — or a pasta shape named after a human joint similar in shape to the elbow but smaller than it: like a knuckle, so knuckle macaroni, on analogy with elbow macaroni; or more generally, knuckle pasta (covering the bent shape for little solid cylinders or flat strips or whatever). If such a thing existed, it could be named after the Italian noun ‘knuckle’, nocca, pl. nocche, so knuckle-shaped pasta might be nocche (or nocchini or nocchelli), but I don’t see any such named pasta available from suppliers. Perhaps there’s no call for them.
For similar phenomena, not intended as jokes, but nevertheless playful, consider, from my 2/1/19 posting “The natural history of snowclones”, with its section on playful allusions to some model fixed expression, replacing items in the fixed expression by analogous items. For example, the “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” advertising campaign that General Motors launched back in the 1990s spawned not your father’s bourbon / root beer / … and then not your mother’s shampoo / tableware / … and much much more, eventually becoming the Not Your R’s X snowclone.
December 9, 2023 at 5:32 am |
How nice to see the “dog tuba” cartoon analysed here, as I was just yesterday in a small email discussion about it! One person (who had brought it up as hard to understand) did not at first accept the “dog whistle” analogy the rest of us were offering, since how could a tuba make a sound too high for human hearing? He suggested it could be *too* *low*, but most of us preferred to say it’s just supposed to be audible to dogs but not humans *for whatever reason or no reason*, not requiring the practical detail of how that would come about.