Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin

Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:

(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke

Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.

Pop-cultural notes. It’s all about the mob.

Vito Corleone is a Mafia boss in The Godfather (the novel and the films).

Then, from Wikipedia on Jimmy Hoffa:

James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913 – disappeared July 30, 1975, declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) from 1957 until 1971. He is notorious for his alleged ties to organized crime and for his disappearance under mysterious circumstances in 1975.

The joke form. From my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”:

Outrageous elaborate set-up puns, based on formulaic expressions, are a genre in themselves, often treated as a kind of shaggy dog story (because of their complexity), though classic shaggy dog stories are anticlimactic, while these formula puns culminate in a complex pay-off [so I sometimes call them setup / payoff puns]. I learned the elaborately transpositional boyfoot bear with teak of Chan in high school, and then the elaborately punning crossing staid lions for immortal porpoises not long after — both, faute de mieux, under the shaggy dog label.

(Yes, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for about 70 years now.)

Some comic strips specialize in them — notably Pearls Before Swine. From my 5/30/20 posting “Force cor”:

(#2) By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis; and yes, you need to know Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

This entry was posted on April 1, 2025 at 7:58 am and is filed under Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Quotations. 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.