đ đ đ trois lapins to inaugurate the month of February. But wait! Are those the hoofbeats of … wildebeests? Stand clear! Make way for gnus!
Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category
The wildebeest caper
February 1, 2023Hello, DalĂ!
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 DalĂ and his surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip â see this Page.)
The egregious pun kosher deli > kosher DalĂ in combination with a play on the title of a DalĂ 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”).
DalĂ’s name is most commonly Englished as /Ëdali/, like Dolly, and that makes the deli > DalĂ pun particularly close ( /É/ > /a/, otherwise perfect), but sometimes maintains the Spanish / Catalan iambic accentuation as /daËli/, in which case the imperfect pun is more distant.
Adventures in cartoon understanding: Victor alignment
January 20, 2023Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title “Job Satisfaction”):
(#1) To understand this cartoon, you need to know something about what a tire and auto service garage does, and you need to recognize the significance of the name Frankenstein (If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip â see this Page.)
But wait! There’s Balthazar!
January 6, 2023(Definitely a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, signaling that I’m still here, after several deeply awful days of medical afflictions — an experience I’ll record in a separate posting, rather than get in the way of an egregious pun for today’s celebration of the Three Magi.)
To get the joke in this Epiphany texty circulating on Facebook (hat tip to Evan Randall Smith) you have to supply background from two (unrelated) domains of cultural knowledge — (A) the Christian mythic tale of the Three Wise Men and the gifts they bring to the baby Jesus; and (B) the pop-cultural splendor of the Boardwalk product pitch famously used by tv adman Billy Mays:
(#1) To understand the thing at all, you need to know (A); but if you don’t know (B), there’s no joke, just a flat-footed recital of the Wise Men’s gifts
Seeker of wise spud, rudely rebuffed
December 30, 2022The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for New Year’s Eve Eve is a goofy amalgam of two different cartoon memes with an egregious pun;Â Wayno’s title is “Reclusive Russets” (russets being a type of potato). No, of course it doesn’t cohere; that’s what makes it delightful (remember that this strip is called Bizarro).
(#1) If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip â see this Page.
The Potato Head meme (all three characters are Potato Heads) and the seeker and the seer meme (one character is seeker, the other two seers), plus some CRAB / CARB play on the compound noun hermit crab, mountain-top seers being hermits who have removed themselves from ordinary life, and potatoes being carbs, specifically starches (complex carbohydrates )
Eggs Benedict Arnold
December 29, 2022Suppose you’re a cartoonist, and this POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) has, well, popped into your head:
eggs Benedict Arnold = eggs Benedict  (breakfast dish of sliced ham on English muffin with hollandaise sauce) + Benedict Arnold (American general who defected to the British during the Revolutionary War)
Can you work this (entertainingly) surprising juxtaposition of elements into a cartoon?
Today, Mike Peters (of Mother Goose and Grimm) took up the challenge:
(#1) The solution is a play on traitor: an egg dish named for a traitor, sold at a place named Traitor Joe’s — with a trader / traitor pun alluding to the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a perfect pun for most Americans, for whom trader and traitor are homophones; a clever imperfect pun for everyone else
Sweet. Meanwhile, others have labored to devise variants of eggs Benedict that are somehow associable with Benedict Arnold.
Lizardry
December 24, 2022
(#1) Xmas card from Tiny Bee Cards, offered on Amazon
Lizard warnings, lizzard warnings, lizards falling from the trees.
In the realm of the footstools
December 1, 2022đ đ đ the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:
(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool
The wrap artist
November 21, 2022Yet another Sick Day for me, so this is a minimal posting — you’ll have to google up stuff on your own — but I was so taken by today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro that I wanted to share it with you (with a bit of commentary, of course):
Wayno’s antic title: “Wrapper’s Delight” (with a pun on wrap vs. rap that I’ve borrowed for the title of this posting); if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip â see this Page
The inevitable holiday porn pun
October 31, 2022(Transparently, celebratorily, crude and graceless, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
đ§ââď¸Â đ§ââď¸ đ§ââď¸Â (the Day of the Vampire) Very briefly, today’s holiday greetings from the rampant sexpigs at Fort Troff: