Yesterday in Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine:
A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke (with a final panel in which the character Rat threatens the cartoonist (as a cartoon character) with violence for committing a preposterous pun
Two things then: The joke form, and Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)
Benita Bendon Campbell wrote me yesterday to report a Monty Python (setup / payoff) formula pun joke that had come up on her Facebook feed, thus providing me with a moment of comic relief from my posting about — here we cheer — being saved from death by the skill and caring of others and then — here we weep — finding that my previous life was entirely gone, to be replaced by one of isolation, disability, and pain, which I had to negotiate by reinventing myself as best I could. Meanwhile, I embrace joy, playful delight, and (I know of no better term) moral purpose, to steer me through the swamp of despair. I have recently celebrated moral purpose (in my 7/20 posting “Days of memory”, with a section on the Good Trouble National Day of Action); today, it’s playful delight.
The joke. As it came to Bonnie:
I was staying at a small family owned hotel in Madrid when I suddenly became ill, nauseous with a fever. My Spanish language skills are limited, so I called the front desk. The concierge told me that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call, and they would send him up to my room. Twenty minutes later the doctor had treated me and my fever and nausea were subsiding. I mentioned to the doctor how lucky it was that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call. Without missing a beat, the doctor smiled and said:
No one expects the Spanish inn physician
Here you groan. You really are expected to groan; that’s the canonical response to a setup / payoff formula pun — the formula in this case being the tagline from a Monty Python routine (slightly misquoted in the version Bonnie came across):
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
(The joke is an imperfect pun, the pun having /f/ where the model has /kw/.)
Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):
… and we are chanting, chanting for our artificial lives … in a spasm of AI-onomatomania. It’s today’s absurd Zippy strip, arriving just in time to relieve the † dark mortality † of the day — Lincoln assassinated 1865, Titanic collides with iceberg 1912 (just wait until tomorrow, when the liner will actually sink):
Onomatomania, aka phrase repetition disorder, is a widespread affliction in the Zippyverse, triggered particularly by trochaic tetrameter phrases, as here: chatbot data mining (S S SW SW), neural network algorithm (SW SW SW SW)
There’s a Page on this blog with links to my (heavily Zippy-oriented) postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.
Advice for Pride Month this year, when forces of hatred and fear, wielding harassment and intimidation, seem increasingly arrayed against LGBT+-folk, threatening our celebrations, attacking the symbols of our communities, spreading malicious disinformation about us, and acting to curtail our rights — so that we have to confront these forces publicly and fiercely. An image of resplendent, powerful, ferociously sharp-toothed pride for the occasion, covering the spectrum from intense red to vibrant purple:
(#1) From my 6/27/15 posting “Gay Pride”, with my comment: rather more adult males than you’d expect in a pride of lions — but then these are gay lions, so they bond with pleasure
(Already back then, 8 years ago, the image was clearly memic, distributed from hand to hand from an original source no one knew (or cared about); some creator crafted this remarkable image and paired it with the punning title Gay Pride — a gay pride for Gay Pride — but we’re almost surely never going to be able to identify the source. It came to me again yesterday, through another acquaintance who found it on Facebook.)
From #1 a fortuitous find enabling an associative leap to a famously savage leonine diorama. And then in another associative leap, to feasting with panthers, to big cats in general (especially those of the genus Panthera), and to gay men who are beautiful, powerful, and fierce.
(Definitely a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, signaling that I’m still here, after several deeply awful days of medical afflictions — an experience I’ll record in a separate posting, rather than get in the way of an egregious pun for today’s celebration of the Three Magi.)
To get the joke in this Epiphany texty circulating on Facebook (hat tip to Evan Randall Smith) you have to supply background from two (unrelated) domains of cultural knowledge — (A) the Christian mythic tale of the Three Wise Men and the gifts they bring to the baby Jesus; and (B) the pop-cultural splendor of the Boardwalk product pitch famously used by tv adman Billy Mays:
(#1) To understand the thing at all, you need to know (A); but if you don’t know (B), there’s no joke, just a flat-footed recital of the Wise Men’s gifts
From recent American broadcast news interviews, yielding notable examples of familiar phenomena: the 2pbfV (2-part back-formed V) family-plan ‘do family planning’; and the phrase-final truncation of a formulaic expression, not give a rat’s ass ‘not care at all’, in the truncated not give a rat’s.
Both phenomena illustrate a drive towards brevity of expression (which makes life easier for the speaker), balanced against the hearer’s need for clarity of expression: to work out what the speaker intended to convey, the hearer must be able to supply crucial background knowledge (they have to know the compound noun family planning, with its specialized sense; they have to know the negative-polarity idiom (not) give a rat’s ass ‘not care at all’ and appreciate the zing in its vulgar minimizer rat’s ass), so the speaker must assess those abilities and craft their speech to suit their audience. It’s a complex dance, and like social dancing, it happens in the moment, on the fly, using practiced patterns while collaborating to make something new.
The One Big Happy for 3/6/10 (yes, 2010), just arrived in my comics feed:
(#1) Ruthie, to her neighbor James, about the adjective regular ‘exemplary’ (in either of two different ways of being exemplary)
In yesterday’s mailbox, this indirect attempt to get me to post (about) something on this blog (untouched except for suppressing its header and the link):
With all do the respect,
I am hitting your inbox without any introduction, sorry for that.
BUT…. we did put around 230+ hours into this article about the most popular dog breeds in the world. (scanned 96 countries)
So check it:
[link]
What you think?
Paws UP or Down?
