(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):
Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum
On to the four contributions.
First thing. The genre of outrageous elaborate set-ups, leading to (surprise) payoff puns based on formulaic expressions — in this case, to
if at first you don’t suck seed, try rye again
(on the joke genre, see my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”; Pastis is notably fond of the genre)
Second thing. The fortuitous homophony of succeed /sʌksid/ and verb + object suck seed — a homophony just begging to be exploited in some kind of pun. As it happens, at least two such puns are available; the one Pastis took advantage of involves NOAD‘s sense 1a of seed:
a flowering plant’s unit of reproduction, capable of developing into another such plant
(as in the seed grains of the cereal grass plant rye in rye bread).
Third thing. The joke form needs some sort of formulaic expression serving as the model for the pun. In this case, the proverb
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again
Which brings us to William Edward Hickson. From Wikipedia:
William Edward Hickson (7 January 1803 – 22 March 1870), commonly known as Richman Hopson and W. E. Hickson, was a British educational writer.
… Hickson is credited with popularising the proverb “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again” in a children’s rhyme that he credits to himself in his The Singing Master (London, 1836), whose chorus begins:
‘Tis a lesson you should heed:
Try, try, try again.
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, try again.This rhyme was introduced to North America by the American educational reformer Thomas H. Palmer in his Teacher’s Manual (Boston, 1840), the refrain being modified to: ‘Try, try again’.
Fourth thing. Pastis strikes no chord resonating with the sexual collocation suck seed, which has seed ‘semen, cum’ as object, using another sense of seed — NOAD’s sense 2a ‘a man’s semen’ — as the basis for the pun: if at first you don’t suck seed — if at first you don’t get your guy to cum in your mouth (hey it happens), then try, try again (or don’t be shy, or get him high, or lick his thigh, or whatever you can set up in a story).
Here, suck seed is just a variant of suck cum, as in the formulaic slur cum-sucking faggots (functioning, as cocksuckers often does, as a generic insult, imputing nothing about sexual desire or sexual practices).
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