Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
