Two cartoons in today’s feed: the 4/5/10 One Big Happy, in which James copes with an unfamiliar technical label by assimilating it to a name he knows; and the 3/21 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with a cute play on hex wrench.
Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category
Auntie Em and the hex wrench
March 21, 2022The Tides of March
March 15, 2022For the 15th of March, Tim Evanson created this image (reproduced here with his permission):
(#1) Tim used a picture from a “Kittendales” calendar; a free clipart calendar page of March; and pictures of Tide products from the Target web site
The prank telegram
March 6, 2022(A posting for my half-birthday, 3/6. When you’re a child, half-birthdays are good things, because a year is a long time to wait till people celebrate your life on earth again. When you’re old and infirm, they’re good things again, because a year is a long time to hope you’ll live till such a celebration comes again. I’ve gotten through another 6 months: a small but significant accomplishment, though frankly it seems mostly to be luck.)
Choosing more or less randomly from the fish in the sea of unblogged postings: this wry Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 1/28:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.) Like an antique prank phone call
The prank turns on an ambiguity, in this case on fresh as a predicate adjective: ‘(of food) recently made or obtained; not canned, frozen, or otherwise preserved’ vs. ‘(of a person) presumptuous, impertinent’ (with the mutton, preposterously, personified).
surfdom
February 22, 2022The Zippy strip for 2/20, in which Bill Griffith gets to goof on surf vs. serf:
(#1) Zippy’s title: “Serf City!!”, playing on the song title “Surf City”
panel 1: the serf wakes up in his cell and gets up — the idiomatic phrase surf’s up, roughly ‘the waves are good for surfing; let’s do it’, so figuratively ‘conditions are good for action; let’s get on with it’
panel 2: the serf surfing the net — the (metaphorical) verb surf ‘move from page to page or site to site on’
panel 3: the serf channel-surfing — the (similarly metaphorical) synthetic-compound verb channel-surf ‘change frequently from one television channel to another’
Le journal du phoque d’approbation
January 27, 2022… est sur le bureau de mon oncle. Or something like that. Two recent Wayno / Piraro Bizarros: from the 24th, le journal (for example, Le Monde, on sale on the street); from today (the 27th), le phoque d’approbation (and his best buddy, le morse du dédain).
The teen fugue
January 11, 2022Yesterday’s (1/10) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro revives plays on fugue and minor (exploited in a 2012 Bizarro), plus (in the title FUGUE IN A MINOR) a clunky play on A the name of a musical key vs. a the indefinite article (which are visually identical in all-caps printing):
(#1) The cartoon figure is a version of the classic portrait of the late Beethoven — the Beethoven of the Grosse Fuge — looking stormily rebellious in a Romantic red scarf, tempered by an image of Johann Sebastian Bach — the great master of the fugue as a musical form — in the powdered wig characteristic of the 18th century (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The word plays are on fugue, musical (“this piece”) or medical (“drifted aimlessly”); and minor, musical (“A minor”) or chronological (“my early teens”, “a minor”).
A look back at the 2012 posting, which had a different play on minor (the minor of music or the minor of significance), and so provided no justification for Wayno’s title for #1, “The First Emo”, with its allusion to emo kids / emos, who stereotypically are sensitive, socially dissociated, rebellious teenagers. And then some reflection on the cartoon composer in #1.
Eating like a Pygmalion
December 28, 2021… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) A play on Shaw / slaw (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).
Eye charts
December 17, 2021Yet another cartoon meme, the Eye Chart, with an instance in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, set in the fictive city of Metropolis:
(#1) It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Yes, it’s also an instance of the “It’s a bird” meme. Memes tend to travel together, like elephants, or municipal buses.
