A little follow-up to the Bizarro cartoon in yesterday’s posting “16 will get you 3”: suppose you were given just Wayno’s central drawing in that cartoon, with the challenge of giving it a name:
Well, there it is, the whole joke in a wordless image, which could stand alone as a puzzle, without any of the framing in the Bizarro version.
You, the viewer, would then have to discover Darth waders.
Well, the title pretty much gives the joke away. An outrageous (but phonologically perfect) pun in a Bizarro cartoon from 9/6/12:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just 1 in this strip — see this Page.)
What the woman and her two kids get to view is Disney on ice —
(the body of the dead-since-1966 Walt) Disney (resting) on (a block of preservative) ice (in a display case)
What she bought tickets to was an entertainment (especially aimed at children) called Disney on Ice —
(an entertainment in which characters from the Walt) Disney (Company’s animated cartoons are portrayed by performers skating) on ice
In yesterday’s (3/20) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a cowboy — call him FM — bellies up to the bar in a saloon in the fabled Old West:
(#1) Though he’s wearing jeans and a handsome Western dress shirt, FM’s greenish pallor, eccentric hair, and neck bolt mark him as an outsider, not from these parts, not from around here; meanwhile, FM is a composite being, cobbled together from random parts — bodyparts — by Victor Frankenstein (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
So there’s parts and there’s parts. And FM’s from parts unknown is a parts ‘bodyparts’ pun on the model of parts ‘places’ in what is now a rather formal and poetical expression from parts unknown ‘coming from an unknown place’. The Frankenstein world superimposed, absurdly, on the Gunslinger world.
Yesterday’s (3/16) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with poutine checkup as an outrageous pun on routine checkup — something for the celebratory days of mid-March, from Pi Day on the 14th through St Patrick’s Day today:
(#1) A regular checkup on the state of the patient’s poutine — the fries, cheese curds, and gravy of this Quebecois specialty (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, the patient is presented as stereotypically Canuck — among other things, wearing a tuque (that knitted wool watch cap) and earmuffs.
Wayno’s title for the cartoon: Say “eh” — evoking another piece of Canadianness, the discourse particle eh; see, from my 5/18/14 posting “… plus four”, this New Yorker cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz:
(#2) On the (mostly) Canadian discourse particle eh, used (roughly) to confirm the attention of the listener (but appearing here in a medical exam in the place of ah); Canadianness is signaled by the RCMP uniform
Passed around in various forms on the net recently, this truly distant, extremely imperfect, pun, partly in German, partly in English, which does, however, come with the signature of its putative maker (Ella Niemans, who, alas, I’ve been unable to find anything about — perhaps because her name might be a joke, playing on German niemand ‘nobody’):
(#1) A monstrously complex joke alluding to US President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech at the Berlin Wall, in which he declared (in his American-accented German) Ich bin ein Berliner, asserting that he was figuratively, in spirit, a citizen of Berlin
So it’s about bin liners and it’s about the Kennedy speech. Complexities on both counts.
From the annals of goofy commercial names, in this case a Thai restaurant name that seems to be intended to project both playfulness — the name is a pun — and power, as in the model for the pun, the adjective titanic ‘of exceptional strength, size, or power’ (NOAD). Thai food that will blow you away.
What makes it goofy is the unfortunate echo of the proper noun Titanic; from NOAD:
a British passenger liner, the largest ship in the world when it was built and supposedly unsinkable, that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in April 1912 and sank with the loss of 1,490 lives.
I was made aware of the restaurant name by a Susan Fischer Facebook posting yesterday; she was passing on, from others on the net, this restaurant image:
(#1) Not identified in its net appearances, but this is a real Thai restaurant, not a piece of digital art or photoshopping: Thai Tanic at 1326 14th St NW, Washington DC (near Logan Circle)
Commenter on this image, someone who got the ship echo: This restaurant is going down.
It’s an old theme on this blog: 6-year-old Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy as a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions by assimilating them, in one way or another, to things that are familiar to her. Some examples surveyed in my 2/3/19 posting “Ruthian lexical items in real life”; and then, yesterday, in the posting “Ruthie goes for the donuts”, she understands windchill as Winchell’s (donuts): the unfamiliar element is the technical meteorological term windchill. and Ruthie copes with it by replacing it with a phonologically similar item that’s familiar to her (she’s fond of Winchell’s donuts):
(#1) unfamiliar windchill / familiar Winchell’s
Over the past three years or so, I’ve been accumulating One Big Happy strips in this vein and am now disgorging six of them: a similarity case, in which Ruthie copes with unfamiliar material by treating it as phonologically similar familiar material (as with windchill / Winchell’s); two ambiguity cases, in which unfamiliar material is homophonous with familiar material, so she has to cope with her mistaken interpretation of what she hears; and three more complex cases (one involving portmanteaus, one involving orthographic abbreviations, and one involving Ruthie’s own analogical creation — Ruthie is indeed ingenious).
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s groan-punning title: “Tuffet Luck” — depends on your knowing one thing from popular culture in the Anglosphere (of, roughly, the past 200 years). If you don’t know that, you’re SOOL; the spider, curds, whey, and tuffet are just weird stuff.
(#1) The spider as ambulatory assault victim; apparently, the spider’s prey was not frightened away, but instead used what they’d learned in self-defense classes (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are (only) 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme. “Little Miss Muffet”, said to have been first recorded in 1805. Traditionally, part of growing up for most children in the Anglosphere (though I wonder if that’s still true), but probably little known elsewhere. And largely opaque to the children who chant it, though I suspect that modern kids are inclined to interpret it as a tale of a male imposing himself on female, and her fleeing from him. Kids would probably understand it as a boy annoying or grossing out a girl with creepy-crawlie things. Older people will think of unwanted advances on the subway, Tyrone F. Horneigh pursuing Gladys Ormphby on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and the like.
The Bizarro version, on the other hand, is much more up-to-date: Muffet Fights Back. Muffet, in fact, Kicks Ass.
Two Bizarro cartoons from 2021, touching on questions of sexual orientation:
(#1) A Piraro Bizarro from 11/7/21: imperfect pun on sexual (orientation): sectional, as in sectional furniture ‘furniture made in sections’ — combined with a (perfect) pun on orientation ‘the relative physical position or direction of something’ (NOAD) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, wow, 12 in this strip — see this Page.)
#1 raises the question of how labile sexual orientation might be: easily changed, like the arrangement of furniture in a room, just a matter of style, fashion, or whim; or more enduring and resistant to change.
(#2) A Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 12/2/21: a complex (but perfect) pun, turning primarily on turn on ‘start, cause to operate’ vs. ‘arouse (sexually)’, but secondarily involving connection in both electrical and emotional senses (Dan Piraro says there are 5 of his symbols in this strip)
#2 is also a joke about visual pornography: the artwork depicts a 9v female connector, so it appeals to the 9v battery, but not to an AA battery, which needs a different sort of connective hardware.
Then there are the brand names: Enervator, a play on the brand name Energizer; and Zap, possibly a play on the Energizer MAX family of alkaline batteries, more likely just the vivid verb zap used for lightning strikes and the like.
Finally, #2 evokes two senses of hard-wired: in computers, ‘permanent, inalterable’; in behavior, ‘inborn, instinctive’. (The connecting idea is that what’s built-in can’t be changed.)
