Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a pun on monitor; and a popular dad joke — even better, a Swiss dad joke, with a pun on plus — retold by Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show yesterday:
Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
The lizard and the flag
June 26, 2021A memic triple
May 9, 2021Version I. A J.C. Duffy cartoon published in the New Yorker on 4/19/10:
(#1) The strip takes two cartoon memes, Desert Island (with a tiny single-castaway island) and Grim Reaper (with Death at the prow of a sleek modern boat); and packages them together as a memic title, the name of a formulaic joke routine: Good News / Bad News
The elephant and plum
April 9, 2021Not Frog and Peach, but Elephant and Plum, in a kid joke as told by Ruthie in the One Big Happy strip from 2/22 (in my comics feed on 3/21):
(#1)
Four things: kid jokes, of which the Elephant and Plum variant above is a particular clever example; the saying about elephants on which it depends; elephant jokes, of which the joke above is not the classic Elephant and Plum exemplar; and the ambiguity of “When did you laugh at it?”, which turns on the defining property of deictic elements like the interrogative when.
Don’t ask!
January 31, 2021Today’s morning name, but it comes with crucial context. The Don’t ask! in question is not the neutral use of the negative imperative, advising the addressee not to ask someone about something (Don’t ask them about the ducks in the kitchen; that just makes them crazy), but instead is a formula of Yiddish-influenced English, normally used only by (American) Jews (or gentiles culturally close to this community), when someone has in fact just asked about the matter in question (the tsuris / tsores ‘troubles’); the speaker doesn’t go on to avoid this sensitive matter, but instead embraces it, launching into kvetching ‘complaining’ about it.
The formula Don’t ask! then serves as an announcement — a kind of alarm bell, if you will — that the speaker is about to go off on a (perhaps extended) kvetch.
The library hookers and booze joke
September 25, 2020
The soup fly
September 1, 2020
Flies met cute
August 9, 2020The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 8/7 features a housefly couple telling the story of how they met:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Where to begin? Well, it’s a decidedly meta cartoon, in which the characters know they are cartoon characters and comment on that fact. And it’s a cartoon in which parallel worlds are aligned and translated from one to the other: a world of conventional American domesticity (in which couples meet and form relationships, and entertain friends in their home); and a world of fly jokes, turning on the appearance of houseflies in soup at restaurants.
All this held together by a story type in film-making: the meet cute form, in which unlikely accidents of meeting lead to romantic involvements.
If a man does it, …
June 11, 2020(A number of jokes, but also some seriously technical linguistics.)
A joke going the rounds on the net recently, here from a exchange posted on Facebook on 3/24 (yes, yes, I am incredibly far behind on my postings; life has been very difficult):
(#1) Anaphoric do it : ‘(a man) sleeps with 10 men’ (the gay reading) vs. ‘(a man) sleeps with 10 women’ (the Don Juan reading)
In a similar vein, this Stone Soup cartoon of 6/17/11:
(#2) Anaphoric do the same, with at least three readings (discussed below), one of them gay
The phenomenon at play here is called sloppy (vs. strict) identity. The gay readings above involve strict identity.
A priest, a rabbit, and a minister
February 26, 2020… walk into a bar. And into a Walk Into Bar joke, which then goes doubly meta. The rabbit brings a really big beer to the event. The joke has been around in print, in one form or another, for maybe 20 years. The image is a fantasist painting “Bunny with Beer” (from 2017) by the artist Omar Rayyan. The two joined in happy union by an unknown hand, during the past few days, in the form of a texty cartoon:
(#1)
Revisiting 31: That’s Good / That’s Bad
August 26, 2019My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.
(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)