… from the New Yorker issue of that day: a Liana Finck cartoon on the never-done work of women; and an Ellis Rosen cartoon featuring a fully-accredited monster.
Archive for the ‘Allusion’ Category
Two 6/22 cartoons
June 19, 2026Hang free or peter out
May 14, 2026Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:
[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a man’s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)
I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:
“Live Free or Die”, the official state motto of New Hampshire
But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.
The chopped / shot reference
May 9, 2026From Bethany “Bitty” Ramirez on Facebook on 5/8:
I chopped the rhubarb
But I did not chop the strawberry
— (#1) Ramirez
BR often writes (mouth-wateringly) about food and its preparation, but not lined out like this, and not with what looks like a reference to the song “I Shot the Sheriff” (in either of its two most famous recordings). Depending on your knowledge of popular music (which probably depends on your age), this is either an ostentatiously playful allusion — pretty much everybody of a certain age knows the song, so it leaps right out as the model for #1 — or an Easter egg quotation — a kind of hidden bonus for those younger listeners who happen to be familiar with the model. (More on OPAs and EEQs below.)
The light hand and the hammer
April 6, 2025On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline
How to shame a dictator
(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)
The gripes of Roth
(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).
And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.
Put a red apple in that mouth
March 22, 2025… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
Slices of pi(e)
March 15, 2025π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)
I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:
Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)
We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.
And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.
1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up
And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!
As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.
On the faux-Hopper watch
February 11, 2025… in which I report on a genre of AI art that I hadn’t realized existed. But first, the story of how this genre came to me. I tell this story without any names attached to the people who wrangled with a piece of this art on Facebook yesterday — because all evidence of this discussion has somehow vanished from my Facebook; I did, however, save a copy of the Mystery Painting that triggered the discussion and then was able to reconstruct the gist of the exchanges from memory.
The Mystery Painting. This came to a friend labeled as a reproduction of a painting by Edward Hopper with the title The Dory. My friend was pleased to have come across a Hopper not known to him:
(#1) Atmospherically Hopperesque: a lone female figure in an urban setting (a railway station); also at night, with lights piercing the dark and the rain
Others chimed in to cast cold water on the poster’s delight. One observed that there was indeed a 1929 Hopper painting called The Dory, but it was, no surprise, a painting of a dory (‘a small flat-bottomed rowboat with a high bow and stern, of a kind originally used for fishing in New England’ (NOAD)) — nothing at all like the scene in #1. And then another volunteered that they had searched through an inventory of Hopper paintings and there was nothing like #1 in it. The consensus was that this was some sort of AI creation, masquerading as a Hopper. The disillusioned poster was dismayed.
May I take your coat?
February 7, 2025A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:
(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer
Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).