On Pinterest recently, a board devoted to Bizarro cartoons, including a fair number relevant to this blog but not previously posted here — from which, the three below (all the work of Dan Piraro alone, without Wayno’s collaboration). Two are about parrots and crackers (the first is also an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme); the third offers a groaner pun on a sexual idiom previously discussed on this blog. (I’ll start with a digression on the most common way parrots figure in cartoons, as adjuncts to pirates.)
Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category
Two parrots and a pear tree
February 1, 2021The fish art of Ray Troll
December 15, 2020An accidental find in preparing yesterday’s posting on Ray Troll’s 2011 political cartoon “Octopi Wall Street”: a whole vein of Ray Troll fish art, most of it silly or raunchy, full of bad puns and surprising references to fish (“The Da Vinci Cod”, featuring the Mona Lisa with a fish). Four examples from a great many…
Tiers of a clown
December 14, 2020Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with an outrageous pun (on tears and tiers):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.) Wayno’s title: Frankenpastry
In this case, the tiers in question are layers in a layered clown pie, clowns being famous for tossing pies in people’s faces.
A diversion at the beginning of election week
November 2, 2020This morning’s little entertainment from the Daily Jocks site:
(#1) A bit of word play on mask and masc(uline), underwear models being chosen for their projection of high masculinity (as here)
John Klamik
August 27, 2020About the gay erotic artist and cartoonist John Klamik, so there wil be references to men’s bodies and mansex, though the hardcore images are off in a posting on AZBlogX. But the topic will obviously not suit every reader.
(This is also a posting from way back in my posting queue, drawing mostly on material collected in 2016.)
The impetus comes from my 4/28/16 posting on this blog, “Gay comics in the 21st century”, with a comment from Billy Britt mentioning Klamik and Tom of Finland.
The Connecticut mystery structure
August 27, 2020A Zippy sequence that began back on 8/3 in this strip (reported on in a section of my 8/3 posting “The art of everyday objects”):
(#1) The premise is that this little house just appeared one day in Bill Griffith’s Connecticut neighborhood, provoking some bafflement as to its origin and function (note: in Bill Griffith’s neighborhood, not in the Dingburg area where the cartoon character Griffy is to be found)
That posting argued that the sliding door with a Z on it is just a standard Z-series barn door.
There followed three strips in which the door slowly opens, revealing someone inside — in fact, Zippy, presenting himself as a real person (like BG (Bill Griffith) rather than Griffy). Then a sequence of 8 increasingly surrealistic strips turning on issues of fiction and reality. Finally, two strips in which it turns out that Zippy is running a farm stand of the mind from that little shed.
Thighland
August 8, 2020(Racy talk and joking about men’s bodies, so probably not to everyone’s taste.)
The background story is an error committed by the Imperator Grabpussy in reading from his text recently, with /θaj/ for /taj/ ‘Thai’, thereby introducing us all to the wonders of Thighland. (Details below.) Wags seized on the error for jokes, and on Facebook Tim Evanson offered photos of the King of Thighland, showing his massive muscular thighs and focusing our attention on the crotch they surround:
(#1) Thigh Guy: Kevin Cesar Portillo, who is all-around massive (he’s 6′5″), a former college basketball player at Miami-Dade CC, Mississippi Valley State, and Ave Maria Univ., now working as a male model (projecting smouldering sexiness) and fitness consultamt
Annals of ambiguity: I feel like making it rough for Schrödinger
June 24, 2020Playing with ambiguity:
— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich
— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth
— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly
— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL
Pavlov’s novelist
June 16, 2020Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with a groaner pun on the name F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) plus an instance of the Pavlov cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The pun is straightforward (it does depend on your recognizing Spot as a conventional name for dogs in English); but though Pavlov isn’t mentioned in the cartoon, it’s all about classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, and the cartoon makes no sense unless you recognize the allusion to Pavlov, and also recall that Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate (and expect food) on hearing a bell ringing (here, the carriage return bell on a typewriter, which younger readers will be unfamiliar with, typewriters being an obsolete technology — but the cartoon helpfully fills in this bit of typewriter arcana).
Force Cor
May 30, 2020Passed on by Jeff Bowles on FB today, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2017:
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.