Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category

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Labor Gay 2024

August 30, 2024

(There will be nekkid guys and man-on-man sex, treated in street language, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Today is penultimate August (the first Emperor of Rome is about to leave the building); also the Friday before U.S. Labor Day (a day that for many people counts as the first of a 4-day holiday weekend marking the end of summer and oh yes, recognizing the labor movement); the day after we celebrate the beheading of John the Baptist (by Herod at the request of Salome, the story goes), popularly known as Head on a Platter Day; the birthday of one old friend from the late 1950s, Ellen Sulkis James; the day before the birthday of another such friend, Benita Bendon Campbell; and the occasion for the TitanMen firm to offer its annual Labor Gay sale, an occasion on which Men at Work on insertive man-on-man sex hawk gay porn (this year, we get the two stars of Breed Me Daddy), and for the GayEmpire firm to advertise its own Labor Gay sale (with an ad featuring the two stars of Hooking Up With Finn Harding). Something for everyone in there.

This year I’m going for the gay porn, mostly because it’s entertaining — there’s a lot that’s ridiculous in gay porn, so even videos I don’t find carnally moving can still be sources of pleasure — but partly because I’m in a light-hearted holiday mood, and partly because I want to lodge some accuracy in advertising complaints.

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Posted in Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Puns | 2 Comments »

The cob-canine corn dog

August 25, 2024

Steven Levine on Facebook on 8/23, reporting in from an enormously crowded Minnesota State Fair, posted this cartoon t-shirt from the fair, with a note of distress:


(#1) SL: I find this t-shirt design to be disturbing. Shades of Charlie the Tuna.

(To which I added: Eat me!) I’ll get to Charlie the vorarephilic horse mackerel (and the Ameglian Major Cow, too) in a little while. But first, on fun-food corn dogs and cob-canine corn dogs.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »

Said the hip flask to the lab flask

August 14, 2024

Today’s Wayno /Piraro Bizarro:


A flasky put-down pun, from the hip flask to the lab flask (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

First, the pun: in the adjective hip ‘following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes’ (NOAD), punning on the bodypart noun hip in hip flask. Now, all the lexical flask stuff.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Insults, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Giving two figs, for science

August 14, 2024

A delightful science-nerd cartoon manifested in several versions being passed around on the net. In my favorite, we’re given a science-illustrator’s b&w drawing of two (edible) figs in cross-section, labeled “fig 1.” and “fig 2.”:


(#1)  The labels we expect are abbreviations for “figure 1.” and “figure 2.”: “fig. 1.” and “fig. 2.”. Instead, we get labels for two figs. Note that the drawings are illustrative figures and also of two figs — so the labels are a subtle graphic pun (“fig” punning on “fig.”)

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Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

Los pozoles, como el sexo

August 14, 2024

(Yes, el sexo. There will be somewhat raunchy penis-talk, in two languages, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, so you’ve been warned. But the centerpiece is the sort of dirty joke that cracks middle-schoolers up, so I don’t see the point in keeping it from kids.)

Yesterday’s adventure in all things posole (in my characteristically American English spelling) / pozole (in the usual Mexican Spanish spelling — in either case, pronounced with an [s]), with my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter L). L and I were putting away the (extensive) leftovers from the lunch he had just cooked for us, when I remarked that I had a huge bowl of superb pozole left over from my last restaurant-food order (from El Grullense Grill in Redwood City), and L was stunned.

First, that I had even heard of pozole — Mexican hominy and meat (classically, pork) soup, traditionally red with chiles, fragrant with spices, a bit sharp with citrus juice, and crunchy with cabbage —  which he had thought of as utterly Mexican, homey comfort food that the rest of the world didn’t know about (the way Vietnamese pho was before it became fashionable). Then, still more amazing, that it was one of my favorite foods, and had been for decades (like, five decades, from when Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who died in 1985) and I made it ourselves in Columbus OH, ’cause where in central Ohio in the 1970s would you find pozole?).

Then, to bolster these fantastical claims, I referred him to two pozole postings on this blog: the first from 2011, describing a considerable previous history with pozole; the second, from 2017, with a recipe for an eccentric, deeply non-traditional (but very tasty) variant, based on chicken (plus tomatillos and huge amounts of cilantro). At which, this exchange:

L: But it’s chicken

A: If you can do it with chicken, you can do it with pork

L [laughs out loud]: We say, el pozole como el sexo, entre más puerco mejor (‘pozole is like sex, the more pork the better’)

A [laughs out loud, asks for the joke written down]

Wonderful: a food joke, about pozole, and a dirty joke, about penises. Happy happy joy joy.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Puns, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off

August 11, 2024

Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro, in three panels: an odd title panel that seems to be mostly about phallicity in the mythic Old West, and two Toto / Tonto confusion panels: the Lone Ranger and Toto (with a glancing allusion to Little Orphan Annie); and Dorothy and Tonto — to which I’ve added a Gershwin song in my title for this posting — to make a rich stew of American pop culture, covering the comics, jokes, movies, radio, tv, and popular music:


(#1) It’s a Sunday panel, so it’s by DP, not Wayno, and it’s a horizontal strip rather than a vertical one-panel gag (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

I’ll look at things panel by panel, then comment on my title for this posting — but first I’ll point out that

— the second panel, set in the desert of the mythic Old West, is from the Lone Ranger world, but with the dog Toto (intruding from the Wizard of Oz world) in place of the faithful Indian companion Tonto (Toto in effect punning on Tonto)

— while the third panel, with Dorothy confronting the Wicked Witch of the West (accompanied by one of her evil flying monkeys) on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, is from the Wizard of Oz world, but with Tonto (intruding from the Lone Ranger world) in place of Toto (Tonto in effect punning on Toto)

Here I’m carrying over my analysis, in yesterday’s posting “Harry’s scaffolding”, of one type of absurdist cartoon as involving an anchor world and an intrusive world; the second panel of #1 stands on its own as one such absurdist cartoon, and the third is another. The special delight of these panels is that the two absurdist cartoons are converses, conceptual mirror images of one another.

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Posted in Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Phonetics, Pop culture, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Variation | 5 Comments »

Flavor of the Week

August 9, 2024

The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:


(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)

For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)

Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.

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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »

The Banana Bread Song

August 3, 2024

Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:


day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come

And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Puns | 5 Comments »

Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A.

August 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291

But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):


(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)

I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.

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Posted in Chemistry, Holidays, Jokes, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »

From the annals of setup / payoff formula puns

July 31, 2024

A particularly elaborate example, which came to me yesterday on the Americana Music Society site on Facebook — on this site because it’s all about Johnny Cash. The story begins:

Few people know that before he was famous, the late Johnny Cash tried a chip full of salsa served backstage in Possumneck, Mississippi that changed his life. It was spicy and tangy and smoky and so good that he just couldn’t get it off of his mind. Unfortunately, there was no jar, no label.

Now, there have been rumors that Johnny had kind of an addictive personality. He would sometimes disappear for days on end. People attributed it to drugs or alcohol. The truth is that he would roam the country searching for the special hot sauce of his dreams. He heard rumors and whispers of the deadly condiment and followed them to countless dead ends. He stopped at every Tex Mex restaurant, truck stop, and Mexican grocery in the South without finding what he sought.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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