Today’s Zippy takes us to a perished donut shop (in Niceville FL), which gives him play for his well-known fascination with the sheer sounds of words:
(#1)
In panel 1, it’s alliteration with /d/: defunct donut dispensary with dismay. In the other two panels, with /ɛks/ (or with a more reduced vowel): examined the extent of extinguished excretions … not exasperated but exuberant. (In the latter case, the choice of vocabuary items is seriously strained, to get alliterative words.)
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.
Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.
(Rudely suggestive song taking off on the names of toys for infants, so sure to be offensive to some.)
Sighted by Ann Burlingham at a toy store in the Pittsburgh suburb of Oakmont (and posted on Facebook on 10/30/19), these “natural rubber teethers”, in a “fruits and vegetables series”:
(#1) Kendall the Kale, Ana Banana, and Arnold the Avocado: teethers from Oli&Carol natural rubber toys
Playing with ambiguity:
— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich
— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth
— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly
— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with a groaner pun on the name F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) plus an instance of the Pavlov cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The pun is straightforward (it does depend on your recognizing Spot as a conventional name for dogs in English); but though Pavlov isn’t mentioned in the cartoon, it’s all about classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, and the cartoon makes no sense unless you recognize the allusion to Pavlov, and also recall that Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate (and expect food) on hearing a bell ringing (here, the carriage return bell on a typewriter, which younger readers will be unfamiliar with, typewriters being an obsolete technology — but the cartoon helpfully fills in this bit of typewriter arcana).
Today’s morning name: South Cackalacky, mildly derogatory slang for South Carolina (suggesting crudeness, rusticity, and remoteness: the boondocks). And Cackalacky, for the Carolinas taken together, with the same associations. (Sorry, Charleston, Charlotte, and Research Triangle.)
Then, of course, such associations can be inverted, to connote local pride, down-hominess, and the like. As has happened in this case.
The 6/1 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, a medical cartoon:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
The crucial thing here is a pop-cultural reference, involving that huge hand (in the drawing) and the reference to being a fan at sporting events (in the text); if you don’t know that connection, the cartoon is just baffling.
Passed on by Jeff Bowles on FB today, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2017:
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro “Writer’s Block”, with a plumber coming to the rescue:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
The plumber’s explanation alerts us to the fact that this is about a pun (involving homonyms), but it doesn’t locate the responsible item. He’s holding out a shoe, indicating that this is the relevant object. Crucially, it’s not just any shoe, but a specific type of shoe, known as a … clog. Ah, and the plumber’s job was presumably to clear a clog in the toilet. (But ya gotta know your shoes.)
Further ah: the clog in the toilet was a clog.
(Men’s bodies and mansex discussed in very plain language — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Bro Buddies, a recent gay porn flick from Falcon Studios, with three topics plucked from it: a bit of sexual slang; facial expressions communicating sexual messages and expressing emotions during sex; and detached body parts that take on a life of their own. Two images (way over the line for WordPress) are stashed away in a posting today on AZBlogX, “Cock run amok”; they’ll be described below.
