Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category

Puns, clever and raunchy

July 28, 2024

Sunday (7/28) is once again Punday, with a clever pun from the PunHub site and a couple of raunchy puns in a gay porn ad on the Gay DVD Empire site. (Warning: the raunchy section is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Part 1: rounding up the sheep. (Let us sing: Bringing in the sheaves / Rounding up the sheep) Passed on to me this morning by Virginia Transue, this cartoon / meme from the PunHub site (whose name is itself a play, on PornHub — there’s also a PubHub, about UK pubs):


(#1) A little festival of phrasal verbs: round up ‘approximate (a number) by altering it to the next larger round number’ vs. round up ‘collect (animals) together for some purpose’

The lexical story from NOAD:

verb round: [with object] …  2 alter (a number) to one less exact but more convenient for calculations [AZ: especially in the PHRASAL VERBS round off / up / down]: we’ll round the weight up to the nearest pound | the committee rounded down the figure | let’s just round it off to an even ten dollars.  PHRASAL VERB round up [a] drive or collect a number of people or animals together for a particular purpose: in the afternoon the cows are rounded up for milking. …

with the direct object of the collecting verb round up understood metonymically, in the sheep-counting context, as the numerical size of the flock (rather than the flock itself).

The PunHub site is an enormous collection of puns (and dad jokes) with various accompaniments, including a store — at which you can order their 2023 book

Is This a Joke? No, It’s a Book!: 100 Puns and Dad Jokes from Instagram’s Largest Pun Comic Creator
by Conor Smith.

Part 2: bred & breakfast at the All the Way Inn. (Kids and the sexually modest should leave this posting NOW.) Also in this morning’s e-mail, from the Gay DVD Empire site, a sale pitch that includes this twice-punning item:


(#2) This time my association is not to a song, but to an antique dirty joke based on the question How far is the Old Log Inn? (To satisfy WordPress modesty, I’ve had to fuzz out four rock-hard pornstar dicks — but that lets us focus on their faces, their torsos, and (for three of them) their (interestingly varied) thigh muscles), plus the  breakfast items, all of which are intended as sexual symbols

I’ll get to some of the richness of this goofy image in a little while, but first the p.r. pitch from Gay DVD Empire, with some more gay porn word play:

It’s not just the eggs that are “over easy” at the All the Way Inn, NakedSword Originals’ Bred & Breakfast. Owned and operated by handsome proprietor Heath Halo, the B&B is nestled in the heart of Venice Beach, California, and, for some reason, it seems to attract the hottest traveling men. Take road-tripper Derek Kage, for example. His piercing eyes and stunning good looks pull Heath into a wild morning of edgy sex that leaves them both dripping wet. Then there’s hotel handyman Beau Butler, who’s ready to fix guest Sumner Blayne’s enormous leaking pipe. Later, Carter Collins and Damian Night celebrate their second anniversary by sunning themselves in the property’s garden, eventually helping to relax each other with hot oil and a passionate outdoor fuck. Things get a little more intense when Drew Valentino and Ty Santana take over one of the B&B’s deluxe suites to cement their dom/sub relationship with a fiery, raw fuck-down. Finally, Sean Xavier and Hazel Hoffman serve Heath their own kind of “breakfast in bed” right in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to Bred & Breakfast: All the Way Inn, where guests check-in to check each other out.

The central puns. The name All the Way Inn puns on the location adverbial all the way in ‘fully inside’ (the asshole, in the gay porn context), while bred and breakfast puns on bed and breakfast / b&b ‘ a guest house or small hotel offering sleeping accommodations and a morning meal’ (NOAD), with bred being the PSP of the verb breed ‘pedicate bareback’ (verb pedicate ‘ to have insertive anal sex with (a man), to fuck (a man) in/up the ass, to ass-fuck (a man)’, adverb bareback‘without a condom’).

The visual symbolism of the components of breakfast. The first man pours coffee — the stream of coffee symbolizing the stream of piss in watersports. The third man holds a plate of pancakes, pancakes usually being a vaginal symbol, but in a gay context an anal symbol. The fourth man holds up a doughnut in one hand while balancing a tray of them with the other, the doughnut being a common symbol of the anal ring. So they’re all happily enjoying their b&b breakfast — everybody’s at least smiling, and the third, très gai, guy is laughing with pleasure — while symbolically engaging in a same-sex orgy.

So in its way the ad photo is charming and funny, four explosively sexy naked studs goofing off with one another and abusing their food and drink symbolically. Everybody’s going to get what he wants, maybe even what he needs.

 

Monday morning delight

July 22, 2024

For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:


(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)

As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).

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Datoro!

July 19, 2024

Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).

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Cu, Co, Ni, & Zn!

July 9, 2024

Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):


(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue; the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.

My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.

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The Putin-on-Ritz pun

June 28, 2024

Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:


(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pútǝn/ for model puttin’ /pÚtǝn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.

It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:

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Perfecto Fancy-Boy

June 24, 2024

Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:


(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith

Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.

And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)

Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.

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The mantra ray

June 21, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro brings us a gigantic terrifying fish that flies underwater and, in their telling, repeats a meditative formula while doing so:


(#1) With mantra ‘a word or sound [in this case, the classic syllable om] repeated to aid concentration in meditation’ (NOAD) punning on manta (ray), the name of the fish (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

mantra ray is one of those puns that are just lying around waiting, begging, to be exploited for a cartoon, so it’s no surprise that others have taken advantage of this comic resource before Wayno got to it; I’ll look at three of them below (one from a famous print cartoonist, two from webcomics).

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The bate shop

June 13, 2024

(Utterly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)

My title: yes, a groaner pun bate (a clipping of masturbate) on bait ‘food used to entice fish as prey’; I am shameless.

Clearing things from my desktop (with great sadness, abandoning postings in preparation that I’d spent hours on but were clearly, in the face of new material constantly streaming in, never going to get written up) I found this site advertising a directory of jack-off clubs (/ jackoff clubs / jack off clubs / jerk-off clubs / wank clubs / masturbation clubs / etc.) — which you can think of as bate shops:

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Punday morning

June 10, 2024

To begin the new week, a bilingual rock-music groaner in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


To understand this cartoon, you have to know the Spanish gratitude formula muchas gracias ‘many thanks’, and you have to know that Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist of the rock group The Grateful Dead; otherwise, the cartoon is just baffling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Garcias (the plural of the name Garcia) is a pun on gracias ‘thanks’ in muchas gracias — but it works better as orthographic play (just AR for RA, a reversal) than as phonological play, since Garcias and gracias are strikingly different in their prosody (second-syllable accent in Garcias, first-syllable accent in gracias); and if Garcias is pronounced in English and gracias in Spanish, they’re also segmentally distinct, notably in the final syllable, [ǝz] in English, [as] in Spanish, and in the phonetics of the r.

 

Queens Pride

May 31, 2024

To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:


Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that

Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.

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