I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
Archive for the ‘Nonsense’ Category
Two DEC-20 cartoons
December 20, 2025Category errors as a joke form
November 7, 2025Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.
Bring me the head of Vladimir Lenin
June 14, 2025The linguist Bert Vaux (information below) has been playing with AI resources for some time; most recently he’s been using head shots of various people — the hot young Brad Pitt and the famously scowling Vladimir Lenin, for example — as elements in AI compositions, today producing this entertaining ad, in which VL goes places VL has never gone before:
(#1) The major contribution to this work is a genuine Bon Ami cleanser print ad from 1949 (which BV posted on Facebook along with #1; I’ll reproduce it below)
For this image I provided a musical text, a burlesque of a wonderful comic song:
You can do such a lot with V. Lenin,
You can use every part of him too.
For work or for pleasure, he’s a triumph he’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that V. Lenin cannot do
Yes, I will also reproduce the original of this text.
hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 2
April 30, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
Perfecto Fancy-Boy
June 24, 2024Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:
(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith
Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.
And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)
Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.
Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes
April 9, 2024Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).
Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.
January 27th
January 27, 2023Every so often the accidents of the calendar bring together remarkably contrasting occasions. This is a day of such cognitive dissonance. Weep with me. Gasp in pleasure and delight with me.
First, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, in 1945, an event that serves as a symbol of the Holocaust — the Shoah — that wiped out around six million Jews (and a number of others) and caused untold suffering.
But then today is also the birthday of two people whose works have brought pleasure to millions: the astonishingly prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in 1756) and the mathematician-turned-comic-writer Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote the Alice books and a number of remarkable nonsense poems under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (born in 1832).
O tasty Tweety! O Tweety, my prey!
July 26, 2022… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
Panjandrumery
July 19, 2022My morning name of 6/5, which came to me, not in my head on awakening (the way morning names usually do), but on Facebook upon my firing up my computer, from John Wells, who was exclaiming with surprised delight: “I’m now a panjandrum“.
JW had just come across a 1/29/19 piece on Tony Thorne’s language and innovation site, “Mockney, Estuary — and the Queen’s English”, in which Thorne referred to “the Linguistics and Phonetics department at UCL [University College London] under the panjandrum of phonology Professor John Wells”.
(#1) Not JW, but the Great Panjandrum of Randolph Caldecott’s 1885 picture book, on its cover (on the book, see below)
Zippyphrases 2
March 11, 2022Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:
(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random
Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).