On the heels of my 3/14 posting “Seeking a penguin caption” (in which the birds are ubiquitous), there come two penguin cartoons in the April 2026 issue of Funny Times: one by Bill DeMain in which the birds are iconic, one by Vaughan Tomlinson in which they are (memically) indistinguishable.
Archive for the ‘Cartoonists’ Category
Penguins, iconic and indistinguishable
March 17, 2026Two Bizarros
November 7, 2025Yesterday’s Wayno/ Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The coupled life, with cook and diner; cooks — I was the diner and helper in Ann’s and my life, the cook in Jacques’s and my life, and I can say that the cook is often anxious about pleasing their audience, the diner (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, highlights of an exchange between Wayno and me that starts out being about this cartoon.
“As the Mind Spins”
October 27, 2025The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
Walking on water
August 22, 2025In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:
(#1) No miracle! But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it
(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)
Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)
Day of the bed scorpions
July 11, 2025On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:
(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)
No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.
Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.
Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:
(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)
Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:
(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)
There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)
Bill, it is the scribbling of a gigantic scoundrel
May 8, 2025… and your buddy’s on the case, we’ll get the miscreant, trust me! That’s the burden of this goofy Desert Island cartoon in the latest (5/12&19/25) issue of the New Yorker:
(#1) Bill’s priceless facial expression suggests that he’s not buying his companion’s attempt at deflection (more…)
Hybrid portmanteaus
March 31, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:
the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).
From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)
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).
Groucho glasses for 12/3
December 3, 2024… the better to see the coming five days
The inspiration for this posting is Tom Toro’s cover “Incognito” for the New Yorker‘s 12/2/24 issue:
(#1) Farm turkeys in pre-Thanksgiving disguise; turkeys (which are not especially clever creatures) apparently believe that no one will see past their Groucho glasses, so that rather than experiencing a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block, they’ll be offered a cigar
So #1 is a big holiday ball of American pop culture; I wonder what your random Japanese, Turk, or Indonesian would make of it, even if you gave them the artists’s title as a clue.
For the quiet room, the loudest food
August 9, 2024An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?
I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.