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 ‘Parodies’ Category
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
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.
The axolotl poem
January 6, 20251/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:
I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.
Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:
As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …
I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.
(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)
Bijlert, Leonardo, parody magnets, and the Priapic-Apollonian opposition
August 5, 2024The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:
(#1) The Olympic drag pose
(#2) The Leonardo original
The Banana Bread Song
August 3, 2024Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:
day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come
And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.
Let’s dance
February 8, 2024From the annals of visual allusion (bordering on parody or burlesque), this David Sipress cartoon in the 2/12&19/24 New Yorker:
(#1) A stripped-down, cartoonized, goofy reinterpretation of a key work of modern art, Matisse’s 1910 painting La Dance (the cartoonist is an old acquaintance on this blog; there is a Page here about my postings on his work)
Hello, Dalí!
January 30, 2023Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro plunges us into a double play on words, plus a visual parody — offered on a platter — as well:
(#1) To understand the cartoon, you need to know about kosher delis (deli, short for delicatessen), and pastrami as a prominent offering in them; and about Salvador Dalí and his surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The egregious pun kosher deli > kosher Dalí in combination with a play on the title of a Dalí painting Persistence of Memory > Persistence of Pastrami (with a visual parody on the painting itself, offered on a platter by the waiter; hence, Wayno’s title, “Culinary Surrealism”).
Dalí’s name is most commonly Englished as /ˈdali/, like Dolly, and that makes the deli > Dalí pun particularly close ( /ɛ/ > /a/, otherwise perfect), but sometimes maintains the Spanish / Catalan iambic accentuation as /daˈli/, in which case the imperfect pun is more distant.
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).
The news for wieners
September 26, 2022(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above — so some readers may want to skip over it)
Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):
(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’
German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.