Following up on yesterday’s pun cartoon by Scott Hilburn (in the posting “Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged”), I looked at his (huge) portfolio of pun cartoons for others I hadn’t already posted on that were worthy of note, found several candidates I was mulling over (though I had quickly become sated with puns), and then ran aground on one I just didn’t really get:
(#1) Well, there’s evidence — the name Annie, that mop of curly red hair — that it involves Little Orphan Annie as a grown woman, with a young son, who she says can’t come out and play with the other boys today, but trills in song that her son will be coming out tomorrow, which is clearly a pun on sun, so there are all those parts, with a pun smack in the middle of the action, but it doesn’t hang together as a joke
But all the pointers are to Annie, the musical based on the comic strip, in which case it makes sense that I don’t get the joke, since I’m one of a select band of people who find the musical cloyingly unwatchable and consequently don’t recognize its songs, not even the plucky tyke’s anthem “Tomorrow” (which, it seems, is enormously popular; in preparing this posting, I have, alas, watched a number of performances of it, so that my judgment of it has crystallized to solid detestation). But, as I frequently note on this blog, if you don’t know the cultural context for the joke in a cartoon, you won’t understand the cartoon.
This time the ignorant cluck who didn’t get the joke was me. (Apparently, a large part of the Anglophone world recognizes the song.)
