Today’s Wayno /Piraro Bizarro:
A flasky put-down pun, from the hip flask to the lab flask (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
First, the pun: in the adjective hip ‘following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes’ (NOAD), punning on the bodypart noun hip in hip flask. Now, all the lexical flask stuff.
flasks. From NOAD, with a general sense a, and specialized senses b through e:
noun flask: [a] a container for liquids. [b] a narrow-necked glass container, typically conical or spherical, used in a laboratory to hold reagents or samples [see laboratory flask below]. [c] a metal container for storing a small amount of liquor, typically to be carried in one’s pocket [see hip flask below]: his silver flask of brandy. [d] a narrow-necked bulbous glass container, typically with a covering of wickerwork, for storing wine or oil. [e] a vacuum flask. [f] the contents of a flask: a flask of coffee.
compound noun hip flask: a small flask for liquor, of a kind intended to be carried in a hip pocket. [AZ: most often made of stainless steel; typically, contoured to fit a hip or thigh]
Then paraphrasing Wikipedia:
compound noun laboratory flask [AZ: lab flask for short], a flask (usually made of glass) characterized by a narrow tubular neck section at the top and a wider vessel body
— like the Erlenmeyer flask in the cartoon. From Wikipedia:
An Erlenmeyer flask … is a type of laboratory flask with a flat bottom, a conical body, and a cylindrical neck. It is named after the German chemist Emil Erlenmeyer (1825–1909), who invented it in 1860.
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