Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category

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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 »

For the quiet room, the loudest food

August 9, 2024

An 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.

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Posted in Books, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

P&G feel the agony of St. Sebastian

June 2, 2024

That’s Pierre et Gilles, the French collaborative artists — playful, way gay, outrageous, and exceptionally fond of sailors — and their approach to what I called, in a 5/20/11 posting, that

widespread and powerful homoerotic subject in artworks, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

From that posting, a P&G depiction of the arrow-pierced, agonized saint:


(#1) Saint Sebastian (1987), focused on the beauty of the young male body; this saint seems more anxious about the future than writhing in agony, and the composition is otherwise restrained

P&G have used StS as a subject at least seven times. I was moved to post on their treatments of the saint by encountering a remarkably campy depiction of him on Pinterest this morning:

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Posted in Art, Facial expression, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and religion, Language and the body, Male art, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

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 »

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