Humor | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category

Food, art, or joke?

December 17, 2023

(Sexually transgressive gingerbread folk, so not to everyone’s taste. But massively silly.)

Well, you could eat them, but would you? Probably not, so it looks like they’re jokey folk art. I’m talking about gingerbread houses, in particular the 7 entrants in the 2023 on-line Gingerbread Competition, year 14, overseen by my old friend, the vagrant multinational (and enthusiastically gay) dancer-artist Matt Adams (hard to describe: when I first met him, he was a bartender at the Three Seasons fusion-Vietnamese restaurant up the street from my house in Palo Alto; now he lives with his husband Justin in the Netherlands), who is to be distinguished from the (straight but also admirable) Stanford-PhD linguist Matthew Adams, also of my acquaintance.

On to the winner, #3, and the runner-up, #7.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and food, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

Resist clever marketing

September 29, 2023

… the slogan from a Funny Times magazine t-shirt ($30):

(#1) [FT‘s ad copy:] Embrace the sweet irony of this nostalgic candy-themed tee! It’s a Funny Times exclusive and perfect for thoughtful candy lovers

The model for the shirt:

(#2) A package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

Now, lots of background.

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Posted in Humor, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Parody | 1 Comment »

Two pleasantries for 9/10

September 10, 2023

My Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting for 9/10, lying uneasily between the silliness of Negation Day on 9/9 (nein nein) and the wrenching anniversary of the horrors of 9/11/2001, and serving as something to show you after the postings I’d been laboring on expanded unmanageably in their scope and after my two-fingered typing hand, already seriously disabled, became barely functional because the middle finger is swollen, inflamed, and effing painful. (Today’s good news is that I got in two hours of Sacred Harp singing via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers — an activity that asks very little of that middle finger.) So, two pleasantries that have came to me on-line:

— in a Pinterest mailing today, an unidentified painting I pegged as surely an attractive Yannis Tsarouchis work (see my 8/12/23 posting “Yannis Tsarouchis”) — indeed, it turned out to be the artist’s Sailor at a table from 1950

— in a Facebook posting by Chris Ambidge on 9/7, from the Green Midget cafe in Bromley, a board offering the items from the Monty Python “Spam” sketch (set in that fictional eatery), which I noted was one of the great pieces of cumulative humor

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Humor, Male art, Movies and tv, My life | Leave a Comment »

Brewster Rockit fails lunch

August 7, 2023

From David Preston on Facebook, the Sunday 8/6 stand-alone Brewster Rockit comic strip, in which the dim-witted hero explains that he failed lunch at school because his sandwich was always peanut butter and jalapenos:

J-this or J-that, who cares — though he admits that jelly would have made better sense

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Posted in Humor, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Hordes of Norsemen insert themselves into a national holiday

May 29, 2023

(Packed with thrusting male genitals and hot man-on-man sex, dirty talk and dirty pictures, absolutely not for kids or the sexually modest. Well, there’s a lot of semen in Norsemen. Please don’t hit me.)

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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Humor, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

You Took the Last Bus Home

April 27, 2023

A bit of light verse that passed my eyes on Facebook and pleased me with its playful exploitation of ambiguity In English. (It went on to serve as the title of the poet’s first book):

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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Humor, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

News for really clean penises

September 16, 2022

(No actual penises are depicted, but there’s plenty of penis-talk, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste)

Offered on Etsy, from LoveLeeSoaps, this hot dog soap set ($12):

(#1) A (phallic) simulacrum of a phallic symbol (starting with the hot dog as symbolic penis) — but intended not for ordinary cleansing purposes (though entirely usable this way), but as a practical joke, a prank, turning on the meticulous realistic detail in the simulacrum

The ad copy:

This soap is made with moisturizing ingredients and looks just like the real thing. They would make the perfect gift for any prankster or even something special for yourself. Place it in a guest bathroom and watch your guests faces when they realize its all soap! This set is large and it even comes packaged inside a retro hot dog bag.

Of course the set is large; this is America, and size matters here.

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Posted in Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Phallicity, Pranks | 2 Comments »

Three greetings for 9/6/22

September 6, 2022

For Woo(l)ly Mammoth’s #82: a fresh greeting formula, a morning hummer, and a fairy woodland bouquet. To which I’m adding some carrot cake and coffee ice cream: it’s not only my birthday, it’s also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, which I’m honoring all aslant (with coffee gelato), as I do so many things. To alter a family saying (If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly): If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing eccentrically (for other occasions: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing outrageously).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Greetings, Holidays, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and plants, Language of sex, Mammoths, Music, My life, Penguins, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | 2 Comments »

Z fudge

August 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 🇨🇭🇨🇭🇨🇭 Hail, Caesar Augustus! (rabbit rabbit rabbit for the 1st day of this month, August) Hail, Helvetia, unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno!

Swiss flags for Swiss National Day, August 1st; I am of course wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts — plus a rainbow-heart tank top, since I cheer for Team Queer as well as Team Helvetica.

But wait! I also cheer for Team Z, of everything named with a Z, from zucchini and zithers, through Zerlina (là ci darem la mano) and Zippy & Zerbina, to Zoroaster / Zarathustra and Zuckerberg, with a special fondness for ZW names: zweiback, zwölf of anything, Die Zwitscher-Maschine, die sieben Zwerge (und Schneewittchen), Zwingli, Zworykin. And, in the food world, I cheer for Team Savory, embracing umami, meaty, fermented, fragrant, and flavor-intense (taking in dark and bitter chocolate). And, in the word world, I cheer for Team Fuck, embracing vocabulary from what I’ve called the profane domain (see my 5/7/18 posting with that title).

So what would catch the eye of someone who cheers for Team Z, Team Savory, and Team Fuck too?

A fudge company with a Z name.

And so, one appeared, in an ad in my Facebook feed, about a week ago. (To anticipate your unspoken query: no Swiss or queer connection I could find. Well, nobody’s perfect.) This ad, for Z. Cioccolato:

(#1) An attractive ad, for a genuinely local company, offering very traditional plain fudges (dark chocolate, milk chocolate) and fudges with nuts (walnuts, pecans, peanuts, almonds, coconut), plus entertaining inventions, eventually working out to confections that would have to be called fudge-adjacent (bottom left above: “7 layer peanut butter pie” (which I would describe as containing some fudge, but not being itself fudge)