💥💥 today is (Double) Disaster Day: (political disaster) Abraham Lincoln assassinated in 1865, (maritime disaster) the steamship Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (to sink the next day); and so the theme of today’s Bizarro cartoon is death, personified
A Grim Reaper cartoon meme made into a silly pun joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
From Jeffrey Golderg the Linguist (not Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist — Jeff the Tongue, not Jeff the Pen) on April 3, passing on a Facebook posting with an old Soviet joke, along with monitory commentary from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder the Historian:
(News note: Snyder, his historian wife Marci Shore, and his philosophy colleague Jason Stanley are all leaving Yale to move to the University of Toronto in the fall)
I’ll comment here briefly on two things: old Soviet jokes, some of them now startlingly applicable to life in the Soviet States of America under President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon; and the naming convention in Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist and Jeff the Tongue.
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin
Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:
(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke
Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.
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.
A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:
(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer
Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).
A remarkable John O’Brien cartoon in the 2/3/25 New Yorker, in which a cowboy whips his lariat in pursuit of a cow, with a stark desert landscape of mesas and buttes outlined behind them:
(#1) But wait! That line in the cartoon is both the lariat — the figure — and the outline of the landscape — the (back)ground — so that looking at the cartoon, you perceive the one, then the other, shifting from one to another: what is figure, what s ground?
It’s a percept-shifting visual illusion, exploiting an ambiguous image, in particular a figure-ground ambiguity. Here done as a joke in a cartoon, a visual parallel to what I’ve called sense-shifting pun jokes.
A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:
(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine
In the 1/17 Zippy strip, Z confronts a pair of clay wraiths, lifeless in body and dead in soul, and tries desperately to interject fun — levity — into the conversation; to counterpose silliness, play, and sheer joy against the dead weight of the world’s pain, suffering, and injustice; to plead for humanity over humorlessness; to advocate for delight, even in the smallest everyday things:
In English, Belgium is a funny word, odd, darkly edgy, and absurd all at once; Lewis Carroll picked the name boojum for his ridiculously dangerous creature in The Hunting of the Snark to capture this strange blend of resonances.
Continuing Bizarro‘s theme from Monday through Wednesday, today’s Waynoratu Nosferamanteau — a Wayno punmanteau based on the film title Nosferatu — examines Transylvanian dentitions:
(#1) In the tradition of Nosferattoo, Nosferachoo, and Nosferatoon, a Nosferatooth X-ray; I must say that that’s a truly splendid vampiric X-ray (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
(I was going to wait to see what Friday and Saturday would bring us on Bizarro before posting this strip, but it brings up an issue in visual symbolism, manifested in Wayno’s adaptation of the two-serpent caduceus (surmounting a tooth) to serve as a symbol of dentistry.)
🎄 🎄 when I began this posting, it was penultimate November, and this year also Black Friday, when the anticipation of Christmas becomes a constant, unremitting dinging, accompanied by exhortations to SHOP NOW; I held to my long-standing practice of not leaving the house on Black Friday for any purpose other than retrieving my mail from the mailboxes in the condo parking lot
Meanwhile:
(#1)
A tale of the jim-jams, the most acute form of the jams (joint and muscle afflictions), a story that began on Friday 11/22 with the jams, reached utter jim-jam misery on Monday 11/25, and then slowly moderated since then; but also a tale of plans gone utterly awry (lyrics above from “Walk on the wild guardsman side”)
