Today’s Pearls Before Swine (by Stephan Pastis), with one of the cartoonist’s formula pun jokes (in a set-up / pay-off format):
(#1) The 5/18/25 strip “Four Scored”: Rat engages in a wandering conversation with his neighbor Nancy, then summarizes their talk for Pig, in a gigantic complex pun on the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”; in the last (meta) panel, Lincoln appears, to shame the cartoonist for his outrage
Once again, down the Gettysburg Address path. From my 5/30/20 posting “Force Cor”, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 12/3/17:
(#2) with this 2020 commentary:By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
Then on the joke form, from my 12/2/23 posting “Sense-shifting pun jokes”, in a section on
The formula pun joke, designed as an (often absurd-sounding) puzzle with with a surprising solution. A vehicle for both imperfect and perfect puns; based (like snowclones) on a formulaic expression of some sort [in this case, the beginning of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”]; and always the punchline of the joke, the pay-off of a set-up story that assembles the parts of the pun.
with a bravura set-up / pay-off performance in the “Force Cor” joke.
No doubt Pastis is, even now, brooding on “For Skor” (Skor, the chocolate toffee bar produced by the Hershey Company), “Foes’ Core”, “Pho Ski Oar”, “Foreskin Ore”, and other paronomastic delights, conjuring up a censorious Lincoln once more time.
May 18, 2025 at 12:23 pm |
I believe jokes like this are called ‘feghoots’. The name was discussed on the ADS-List ages ago, when my in-laws were alive, probably in the early nineties.
May 18, 2025 at 1:28 pm |
Well, they are *also* called feghoots. I missed the alternative name, though I knew that the joke form had a long history. There’s a very substantial Wikipedia page on the form
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feghoot)
that begins:
I hardly ever — maybe never — try to track back alternative names for some phenomenon I write about. In fact, I rarely if ever claim to have discovered the phenomenon. Writing the history of discussions of a phenomenon and the history of names for it usually turn out to be labors of months or years, so beyond my abilities. I’m just an expositor.
May 20, 2025 at 10:44 am |
Years ago a local NPR affiliated radio station used to play episodes of BBC comedy programs, one of which, “My Word”, always ended with two panelists (Frank Muir and Denis Norden) (supposedly) improvising a pun-filled backstory behind a well-known phrase or quotation. Quite amusing. They’re probably available online somewhere.
May 20, 2025 at 11:36 am |
I remember the show from living in the UK, but I’d forgotten that final segment, which can be seen as running a formula pun joke in reverse — supplying the set-up that leads to a given payoff.