Well, yeah, a spoiler. But the title should make you wonder how Stephan Pastis manages to weave together the whole setup / payoff formula pun in today’s (9/13) Pearls Before Swine strip. Here it comes:
Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category
Edible primate
September 4, 2026
Santa Maria! La Piña!
September 2, 2026Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers a pun using the available resources sparingly: piñata coladas — piña coladas as made by (anthropomorphized) piñatas:
Helpfully, with a recipe (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
A pun of impossibility
August 29, 2026Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 — see this Page)
Mononga Hela!
July 1, 2026🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!
But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:
Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela
Enjoy your night in Tunisia
June 26, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26:
(#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a valet parker.
Going down on Rosh Hashanah
June 26, 2026(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England
June 2, 2026(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):
Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum
On to the four contributions.
The server’s absurd attentions
May 31, 2026Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!
This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation
