The One Big Happy from 1/31, expoiting a pervasive ambiguity in location adverbials, in this case the interrogative where:
(#1) Body-location where (Joe’s intended interpretation) vs. event-location where (Ruthie’s perceived interpretation)
Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
Body-location, event-location
February 27, 2019Fly formulaicity
October 8, 2018… in the 10/3 Wayno/Bizarro collab entitled “Off the wall”:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
A little festival of formulaicity. In the title, the (informal) idiom off the wall and an allusion to the idiom fly on the wall. In the interviewee’s remark, the (colloquial) idiom fly in the buttermilk and perhaps an allusion to the song “Ole Buttermilk Sky” [10/9: but see the comment below on “Skip to My Lou”]; an allusion to a family of “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” jokes; and the idiom fly in the ointment. Plus a pair of excellently anthropomorphic houseflies on a tv talkshow; if it’s a late-night show, it could be Fly By Night (with the idiom fly-by-night).
Stick insects and tree crickets
September 1, 2018Today’s morning name: stick insect (creatures from my insect-collecting childhood):
(#1) The strong stick insect, Anchiale briareus
Fascinating creatures, with long bodies and camouflage coloration — brown like sticks, green like leaves.
Probably in my mind from a Facebook query by Georgia Morgan on the 30th about a long-bodied brownish insect that had turned up on a screen in her Brattleboro VT house. Which, as it turned out, was a tree cricket, not a stick insect.
A celebrated kid riddle:
Q: What’s long, brown, and sticky?
Return to the Amherst Diner in Winchester VA
June 23, 2018
Psychiatrist Meme Day
May 14, 2018… at King Features Syndicate, or so it seems. In my feed today, three cartoons (of my five regulars from King) with a psychoanalyst and his couch: a Bizarro/Wayno with an empty couch; a Zippy with Zippy on the couch; and a Mother Goose and Grimm with the dog Grimm on the couch.
Haiku Robot
March 25, 2018An Instagram site that searches for posted material that can be treated as a haiku (a 3-line poetic form with 5, 7, and 5 syllables in the lines). Recently, the robot took on sex between men (not at all graphically).
An example of a found haiku, based on a posting that went:
I suppose ant-man’s boss could be considered a micromanager
— to which the robot responded with the 5-7-5 version:
i suppose ant-man’s
boss could be considered a
micromanager
Two memic cartoons
March 4, 2018For today: a Zippy playing on the Walk Into Bar joke format and a Bizarro that combines three cartoon memes: the Psychiatrist, Multiple Personality, and Batman:
(#1)
(#2) For National Multiple Personality Day, March 5th
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Husbands and wives
September 22, 2017Three veins of spousal humor, starting in the early 19th century and ending in an edgily close-to-life comic stereotype realized in cartoons, tv shows, and movies.
Revisiting 7: NL:W
September 17, 2017Yesterday, a posting on the story of a joke (Not Lady: Wife, NL:W for short) whose canonical form is
A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
The vector for the spread of the joke seems to have been the vaudeville team Weber & Fields, who allegedly used it in their stage routines over a century ago. But I found no first-hand reports, so I appealed to the hounds of ADS-L for attestations. This netted a clear occurrence from 1859, but embedded in a long and complex back story (though again with the stage German accent of W&F). And an earlier British antecedent.
Then Larry Horn chimed in with some astute observations on the semantics and pragmatics of NL:W.
All will be reproduced here.
The NL:W punchline
September 16, 2017The lead-in tag to my recent posting on marmots:
That’s no beaver, that’s my marmot!
A take-off on a punchline to a vaudeville joke from long ago, a line that’s been played with many thousands of times in the last century. The No Lady: Wife (NL:W) formula, in two common instantiations in a two-man exchange:
1 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: She was no lady. She was my wife.2 A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
B: That was no lady; that was my wife.
