The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26:
(#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a valet parker.
Music and food. From the above, a Charlie Parker lurch to “A Night in Tunisia”; from Wikipedia:
“A Night in Tunisia” is a musical composition written in 1942 by American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie that has become a jazz standard. Dizzy wrote it while he was playing with the Benny Carter band.
… Charlie Parker’s recording of 28 March 1946, for Dial Records, features Miles Davis on trumpet and includes the “famous alto break” that became synonymous with Parker. (Parker’s composition “Ornithology” is on the B side.)
And from there, despite the song’s having nothing whatsoever to do with the North African nation of Tunisia, at least originally, we lurch to the local cuisine and one of its most characteristic elements; from NOAD:
noun harissa: a hot sauce or paste used in North African cuisine, made from chili peppers, paprika, and olive oil.
One more Charlie Parker cartoon. On this blog in my 8/4/17 posting “WaynoPOPs”:
(#2) A Waynovision strip with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Checkpoint Charlie Parker (= Checkpoint Charlie + Charlie Parker)
June 26, 2026 at 8:06 pm |
Thank you Mr zwicky
June 26, 2026 at 8:57 pm |
Thanks for the exegesis; I don’t think I would’ve gotten this one without you.
June 27, 2026 at 4:38 am |
It really was a genius move to compose a joke out of the musician Charlie Parker, the cartoon character Charlie Brown, and parking valets; serious applause for my friend Wayno. But then the cartoon allowed me to go off on separate riffs about the music and the food (which allowed me to share my enthusiasms). Especially the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early Gillespie-Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage, but if I said that it would just sound like earnest professorial lecturing; instead, I want to help people stumble on it — because of something I said in passing — and fall in love with it. So I plant a seed.