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.
A delightful science-nerd cartoon manifested in several versions being passed around on the net. In my favorite, we’re given a science-illustrator’s b&w drawing of two (edible) figs in cross-section, labeled “fig 1.” and “fig 2.”:
(#1) The labels we expect are abbreviations for “figure 1.” and “figure 2.”: “fig. 1.” and “fig. 2.”. Instead, we get labels for two figs. Note that the drawings are illustrative figures and also of two figs — so the labels are a subtle graphic pun (“fig” punning on “fig.”)
(Yes, el sexo. There will be somewhat raunchy penis-talk, in two languages, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, so you’ve been warned. But the centerpiece is the sort of dirty joke that cracks middle-schoolers up, so I don’t see the point in keeping it from kids.)
Yesterday’s adventure in all things posole (in my characteristically American English spelling) / pozole (in the usual Mexican Spanish spelling — in either case, pronounced with an [s]), with my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter L). L and I were putting away the (extensive) leftovers from the lunch he had just cooked for us, when I remarked that I had a huge bowl of superb pozole left over from my last restaurant-food order (from El Grullense Grill in Redwood City), and L was stunned.
First, that I had even heard of pozole — Mexican hominy and meat (classically, pork) soup, traditionally red with chiles, fragrant with spices, a bit sharp with citrus juice, and crunchy with cabbage — which he had thought of as utterly Mexican, homey comfort food that the rest of the world didn’t know about (the way Vietnamese pho was before it became fashionable). Then, still more amazing, that it was one of my favorite foods, and had been for decades (like, five decades, from when Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who died in 1985) and I made it ourselves in Columbus OH, ’cause where in central Ohio in the 1970s would you find pozole?).
Then, to bolster these fantastical claims, I referred him to two pozole postings on this blog: the first from 2011, describing a considerable previous history with pozole; the second, from 2017, with a recipe for an eccentric, deeply non-traditional (but very tasty) variant, based on chicken (plus tomatillos and huge amounts of cilantro). At which, this exchange:
L: But it’s chicken
A: If you can do it with chicken, you can do it with pork
L [laughs out loud]: We say, el pozole como el sexo, entre más puerco mejor (‘pozole is like sex, the more pork the better’)
A [laughs out loud, asks for the joke written down]
Wonderful: a food joke, about pozole, and a dirty joke, about penises. Happy happy joy joy.
By some odd accident, today has turned out to be Holster Day — it’s also, unrelatedly, the (96th) birthday of the late Bill Bright, eminent linguist and great friend — as the first panel in a Bizarro cartoon from my 8/11 posting “Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off” washed up against Lee Falk’s depiction of his comic-strip hero the Phantom, which came by me on Facebook. What they share is well-filled holsters (flaunting their phallic attractions).
(#1) The Bizarro panel. Phallos the skeleton gunslinger of the Old West, illustrating a variant of the Concealed Carry joke: Is that a banana in your holster, or are you just happy to see me?
(#2) Falk’s Phantom. The double-holstered hero, brandishing one of his two handguns
For all seasons, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky wrote me a little while back, in recommending a Wooly Mammoth fashion plate (in wool) from the “Autumn / Winter 300,000 years ago collection” by Ruby (rubyetc_) on Instagram (where she identifies herself as “lllustrator, artist, big silly”); Ruby’s full set of mammothwear:
In wool, but also in linen, latex, and tulle (fashions for all tastes)
From NOAD:
adj. woolly (US also wooly): 1 [a] made of wool: a red woolly hat. [b] (of an animal, plant, or part) bearing or naturally covered with wool or hair resembling wool: woolly gray-green foliage | the woolly aphid. [c] resembling wool in texture or appearance: woolly wisps of cloud. …
Hence the name of the (now-extinct) wool(l)y mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), which was covered in warm fur.
In my e-mail recently, the program for this year’s New Yorker Festival, with some of the interviewees in a display ad:
(#1) No, I don’t know why pink; Cumming, Maddow, and Torres are notably LGBT, but not the other five in this display (maybe 3 out of 8 exceeds some tipping point, but it’s more likely that pink’s just a random color choice, devoid of meaning)
Now, which of these 8 is not like the others? Well, that’s an odd photo of singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, but it’s an atypical one. Otherwise, Julio Torres’s photo does stand, or leap, out, and for him it’s fairly restrained; his pictures show him with a wide variety of hair colors (sometimes involving henna red or bright blue) and bodily adornments, and sometimes in drag. Meanwhile, he’s young, adorable, outrageous, smart, and dead series about creating comedy in a variety of forms.
Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro, in three panels: an odd title panel that seems to be mostly about phallicity in the mythic Old West, and two Toto / Tonto confusion panels: the Lone Ranger and Toto (with a glancing allusion to Little Orphan Annie); and Dorothy and Tonto — to which I’ve added a Gershwin song in my title for this posting — to make a rich stew of American pop culture, covering the comics, jokes, movies, radio, tv, and popular music:
(#1) It’s a Sunday panel, so it’s by DP, not Wayno, and it’s a horizontal strip rather than a vertical one-panel gag (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
I’ll look at things panel by panel, then comment on my title for this posting — but first I’ll point out that
— the second panel, set in the desert of the mythic Old West, is from the Lone Ranger world, but with the dog Toto (intruding from the Wizard of Oz world) in place of the faithful Indian companion Tonto (Toto in effect punning on Tonto)
— while the third panel, with Dorothy confronting the Wicked Witch of the West (accompanied by one of her evil flying monkeys) on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, is from the Wizard of Oz world, but with Tonto (intruding from the Lone Ranger world) in place of Toto (Tonto in effect punning on Toto)
Here I’m carrying over my analysis, in yesterday’s posting “Harry’s scaffolding”, of one type of absurdist cartoon as involving an anchor world and an intrusive world; the second panel of #1 stands on its own as one such absurdist cartoon, and the third is another. The special delight of these panels is that the two absurdist cartoons are converses, conceptual mirror images of one another.
From New Yorker bob (Bob Eckstein) — a regular visitor on this blog — in the West Side Rag (in NYC), as reproduced in his 8/9 newsletter The Bob, this charmingly absurdist cartoon:
(#1) Into an ordinary living room obtrudes one of the banes of urban street life, the often years-long scaffolding for construction projects — highlighted here by showing not just the scaffold structure of pipes, but also some green protective sheeting for the project (this in an otherwise b&w cartoon, so it’s shriekingly obtrusive)
Very roughly, cartoons and comics hinge on either word play (very commonly, punning) or the humor of situation. In turn, the humor of situation either comments on social, cultural, or political matters, or displays an absurdity — like surrealistic art, depicting discordant, inappropriate, ambivalent, or inexplicable elements of some situation, as if in a dream. And then, a lot of absurdos (absurdist cartoons) depict scenes that seem surreal because they unfold simultaneously in two different worlds, in what I’ll call an anchor world and an intrusive world.
The cartoon in #1 is a two-world absurdo. The anchor world is a modern middle-class living room, inhabited by three characters all sitting on comfortable furniture in the room: two women engaged in conversation about the third character, Harry, who’s engrossed in reading something. The trouble with Harry is that he’s covered in scaffolding, as in the intrusive world, a city street where construction is going on.
An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?
I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.
The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
