Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
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).
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Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Idioms, Jokes, Language and race, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Slang | 2 Comments »
September 1, 2018
Today’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?
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Posted in Jokes, Language and animals, Morning names | 1 Comment »
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.
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language and medicine, Language and religion, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology and syntax, Phallicity, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
March 25, 2018
An 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
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Implicature, Jokes, Memes, Movies, Poetic form, Relevance, Semantics, Variation | Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2018
For 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.)
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Posted in Holidays, Jokes, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Movies and tv, Puns | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2017
Yesterday, 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.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Implicature, Jokes, Language and the sexes, Pragmatics, Quotations, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
September 16, 2017
The 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.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language and the sexes, Quotations | 3 Comments »
August 13, 2017
Two days ago, I set a competition for readers:
Compose a follow-up to the following lead-in to a joke:
Tom, Taylor, and Jonathan Swift walk into a bar…
Three matters, having to do with reduced coordination, joke forms, and sociocultural categories.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Coordination, Implicature, Jokes | Leave a Comment »
