Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category

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Force Cor

May 30, 2020

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.

Posted in Comic conventions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 4 Comments »

The shoe in the toilet

May 22, 2020

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.

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Posted in Clothing, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Bro Buddies

May 21, 2020

(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.

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Posted in Books, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Puns | 3 Comments »

The toroids of York

May 19, 2020

Two recent Zippy strips on Maple Donuts in York PA:


(#1) From 5/11; note the sign “Drive Thru / God Bless / America”; Maple Donuts has 4 locations in the York PA area, and it’s not clear which one appears in any particular Zippy strip, or whether Bill Griffith has created cartoon amalgams of them; and note the title “Covfefe Break”


(#2) From 5/15, specifically on the noun toroid ‘geometric figure resembling a torus’

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Posted in Diners, Errors, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The goblet with the hobbit has the wine that is fine

May 13, 2020

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, about gobs and goblets:


(#1) Wayno’s title: “Liquid Economics” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Start with the straightforward stuff: goblet vs. gob, with goblet playfully treated here as if it were gob + diminutive –let.

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Posted in Books, Derivation, Diminutive, Etymology, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »

The Book of Norman

May 9, 2020

Today’s Zippy takes us us to diner of his religion, as described in its sacred text, the Book of Norman:

(#1)

As it happens, these same characters have struck these same poses in this very diner before, but they had different things to say to one another.

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Posted in Diners, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

Joe and the cucumber sandwiches

April 30, 2020

Today’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon, “Tea Time”:

(#1)

You are expected to recognize, from the title and from the drawing (showing a teapot, teacups, sugar bowl, and 3-tiered tray of fingerfood) that this depicts an afternoon tea — not tea plants in the afternoon, or merely the beverage tea taken in the afternoon, but (from NOAD):

noun tea: … 3 chiefly British a light afternoon meal consisting typically of tea to drink, sandwiches, and cakes.

But that won’t help you with the text, in which one tea sandwich asks of another (identified as female) why the latter brought Joe — Joe clearly referring to the one discordant element in the drawing, who appears to be a hamburger bun overstuffed with a meat filling, some of which has spilled out onto the table. Messy, messy Joe, who “just can’t pull himself together”.

Clearly, that one line, in conjunction with Joe’s appearance, is somehow the crux of the joke. But how?

For this, you have to know a bit about vernacular American foodstuffs, in particular the sandwich known as a sloppy joe. So it’s a pun on the name — and also, it turns out, a gender joke.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Puns, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Magritte by Banksy

April 29, 2020

Noted by Facebook posters recently, this Banksy takeoff on Magritte, photographed here from the side to make its 3-dimensional character clear:


(#1) Banksy’s This is a Pipe (2011), a play on René Magritte’s La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images:  Ceci n’est pas une pipe)


(#2) The Magritte model

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Posted in Art, Paradoxes, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Two cartoons for late April

April 24, 2020

In the world of annually recurring dates, Wednesday was Earth Day, Thursday was St. George’s Day, and tomorrow is World Penguin Day. Into this olla podrida of holidays walk a pastor, a priest, a rabbi, and a pie-throwing clown working as an erotic masseur.

Colby Jones, cartooning as Sir Colby, with a meta Walk Into Bar joke; and Bob Eckstein, offering the comic amalgam of clown and masseur.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The Grim Mouser

April 16, 2020

The 4/13 Rhymes With Orange brings us the Grim Reaper and his cats (we know from Terry Pratchett that Death is fond of cats):

(#1)

We don’t know if this Grim Reaper is a general operator, reaping souls of many creatures, including mice; or whether this one is a specialist in mice — perhaps of a tribe, or race, of Grim Mousers; or of a professional guild of them. (See below, on the Death of Rats.)

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Eponyms, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

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