Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category

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At the zeugmoid laundry

December 3, 2025

A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:

If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]

(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using  the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:

If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]

[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.

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Posted in Context, Figures of speech, Humor, Modality, Pragmatics, Salience, Zeugma | Leave a Comment »

Skyparty

August 21, 2025

In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:


(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)

Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.

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Posted in Clothing, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Social class, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

Tip of the tongue

July 24, 2025

The briefest of shots. Following on my posting yesterday “A Monty Python formula pun”, Benita Bendon Campbell wrote to say that she has been reading The Autobiography of the Pythons by Chapman, Palin, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, and Jones (originally published in 2003) and reports that in it, John Cleese goes on at length about Clump of Plinths, a successful Footlights Club show at Cambridge (pre-Python); he really loves that show.

Clump of Plinths is evocative of (I think) some Scots expression that’s distressingly on the tip of my tongue but is being blocked for me by Firth of Forth. Or maybe that memory of mine is an illusion. My mind is in a whirl.

 

Posted in Books, Humor, Memory, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Falling apart: the meta-posting

March 11, 2025

An excursion into the title of yesterday’s posting “Things fall apart”, a wry tale of the misfortunes of daily life, with the following moment, in which a can opener literally falls apart, as its comedic center:

Can openers are difficult for me to operate. But I wrestled with it, and had gotten the can half open when the opener sprung apart, spraying gears and handles and other parts all over the kitchen counter. I then discovered that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again; the can opener had turned into a useless pile of metal and plastic trash.

My title has a distinguished pedigree, in this poetic line from William Butler Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Which then provided the title of the stunning 1958 novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

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

Three men walk into a bar

March 2, 2025

Neville Chamberlain, Philippe Pétain, and Vidkun Quisling walk into a coal-miners’ bar in Donetsk, in Russian-occupied Donbass, where a band of Putin-lookalikes is warming up for their evening set. The out-of-towners order three bottles of cheap vodka, one for each of them, but the bartender confesses he has only one bottle left, so they’ll have to compete for it. A singing contest, he says, and the band will play any melody you choose. The boys at the bar will vote on your singing.

Pétain went first, belting out Госуда́рственный гимн Росси́йской Федера́ции ‘State Anthem of the Russian Federation’ (lyrics from 2000, music from 1939), which got some appreciative catcalls but mostly polite applause.

Next up, Quisling performed a surprisingly seductive rendition of Подмосковные вечера ‘Moscw Nights’, a Soviet Russian patriotic song from 1956, and the guys at the bar went wild, miming lewdly what they’d do on their patriotic Moscow nights.

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Posted in Humor, Jokes, Language and politics, Russian, Ukrainian | 2 Comments »

The half-disaster

February 24, 2025

An antic tale of medical misadventure — in the sprit of yesterday’s posting “The knuckle nick” — from a while back on Facebook, but not chronicled here. Now I have a lot to say about the half-disaster of the time and the responses to my original report, but I’ll start with that report verbatim, because it was crafted as an account of unpleasant experiences in a maximally upbeat and entertaining fashion, to match my frame of mind at the time.

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Posted in Humor, Language and medicine, My life, Narrative, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

Elegantized insults

January 29, 2025

elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of English vocabulary or its very formal registers, for the purpose of humor, either pointed mockery (amplifying the insult) or droll playfulness (entertaining the audience).

Two examples conveying ‘without courage’. An example of the first type (and conveying mockery) came to me a few days ago in e-mail: anorchídic as a replacement for the insult ball-less. Then an example of the second type (and conveying jocularity): lacking intestinal fortitude for the insult gutless. I’ll go through the examples in some detail, and then riff some on sophisticated insults, in various senses of sophisticated.

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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Humor, Insults, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Slang, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

The axolotl poem

January 6, 2025

1/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:

I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.

Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:

As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …

I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.

(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)

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Posted in Humor, Language and animals, Language play, Parodies, Poetic form, Poetry | 1 Comment »

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.

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Posted in Anniversaries, Art, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Baritone Bennington attacks the Ode to Joy

November 13, 2024

From Benita Bendon Campbell back on 11/1, a joyous diversion from painful times (“Something funny, we need something funny”): Rowan Atkinson playing “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington singing the Ode to Joy … until things go awry and he has to improvise a German text to Beethoven’s soaring tune. You can watch the YouTube video here.

And now, much more detail, from the Classic FM site (“the most relaxing music”), “The time Rowan Atkinson ‘forgot’ the words to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in hilarious skit” by Maddy Shaw Roberts on 5/11/21:


The Ode’s progress (picture: YouTube)

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Posted in German, Humor, Music, Phonetics, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

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