Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category

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Blutonic dialogue

May 13, 2024

In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Blutonic dialogue: an encounter in which a young woman discusses a platonic relationship with an apparently tamed (and clearly dismayed) incarnation of the villainous and brutal Bluto from the Popeye comics and animations:


(#1) A pun on platonic relationship (NOAD: adj. platonic: (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Wayno’s title: “The Mistaken Mariner” — simple friendship not being what Bluto had in mind.

Meanwhile, there’s my Blutonic dialogue, a pun on Platonic dialogue:

Plato wrote approximately 35 dialogues, in most of which Socrates is the main character. (Wikipedia link)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Philosophy, Puns | Leave a Comment »

One of Hilburn’s puns of steel

May 7, 2024

In Pinterest this morning, Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater comic strip of 9/25/20:


(#1) This from the creator of the Puns of Steel collections

#1 is a still from a sad tale of chickpeas smashed to death in a cheap Baltimore apartment, an episode of the tv drama Hummuscide: Life on the Street; meanwhile, death strikes down a rich legume in the novel The Great Garbanzo, in which the title character is murdered by a distraught husband. The grand fictions of Cicer arietinum.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

Free-range folklore

May 5, 2024

… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:


(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Dance, Folklore, French, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

A custom-made eggcup

May 4, 2024

Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)

But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.

The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.

A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:


In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup

Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Technology | 5 Comments »

Name that taqueria

April 29, 2024

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.


(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

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Posted in Grammatical gender, Language and food, Language in advertising, Libfixes, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Something in the way the pun unfolds

April 23, 2024

The Pearls Before Swine strip of 4/21 has cartoonist Stephan Pastis committing a formula pun joke, a genre of humor at which he’s a master:


(#1) Pig assembles, for Goat as his straight man, the parts of an outrageous pun on the first two lines of the Beatles’ song “Something”: Something in the way she moves / Attracts me like no other lover (and then in the last, frame-breaking, panel, Goat upbraids Pastis for exploiting him for the sake of a joke)

So, two things: formula pun jokes; and the song “Something”.

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

It’s that actor again

April 18, 2024

If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.

In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.

This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.

While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).

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Posted in Actors, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »

Big Mama Annie and her little boy

April 13, 2024

Following up on yesterday’s pun cartoon by Scott Hilburn (in the posting “Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged”), I looked at his (huge) portfolio of pun cartoons for others I hadn’t already posted on that were worthy of note, found several candidates I was mulling over (though I had quickly become sated with puns), and then ran aground on one I just didn’t really get:


(#1) Well, there’s evidence — the name Annie, that mop of curly red hair — that it involves Little Orphan Annie as a grown woman, with a young son, who she says can’t come out and play with the other boys today, but trills in song that her son will be coming out tomorrow, which is clearly a pun on sun, so there are all those parts, with a pun smack in the middle of the action, but it doesn’t hang together as a joke

But all the pointers are to Annie, the musical based on the comic strip, in which case it makes sense that I don’t get the joke, since I’m one of a select band of people who find the musical cloyingly unwatchable and consequently don’t recognize its songs, not even the plucky tyke’s anthem “Tomorrow” (which, it seems, is enormously popular; in preparing this posting, I have, alas, watched a number of performances of it, so that my judgment of it has crystallized to solid detestation). But, as I frequently note on this blog, if you don’t know the cultural context for the joke in a cartoon, you won’t understand the cartoon.

This time the ignorant cluck who didn’t get the joke was me. (Apparently, a large part of the Anglophone world recognizes the song.)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged

April 12, 2024

Alternatively, someone appeared and charged the battery. Same image, text interpreted differently. It’s a little study in collocations — material that frequently cooccurs (while falling short of being a stock expression): rhinos charge, people charge batteries. Here, in overlapping fashion, producing a wonderful pun in this Scott Hilburn cartoon:


Collocated with subject rhino, the verb charge is especially congenial to NOAD‘s sense 5b; collocated with direct object vehicle, to sense 4a — and here you get them both (rhinos are famous, of course, for never going on the road without booster cables; they are always ready to charge)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes

April 9, 2024

Aka: 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.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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