Drew Dernavich in the August 20th New Yorker:
(#1) “Would you like to sample something from the nacho cart?”
An office cart conveying a gigantic heap of nachos, with hot cheese dripping over the side. Underneath are who knows what astounding toppings for the taco chips, your choice.
A demented dessert cart, transporting horror-movie foodstuffs. The fanciest of high-end dining juxtaposed with low-end cheap thrills and street food, smelling of Mexican food trucks.
… front-accented (especially trochaic) tetrametric, in fact. Separately and in concert. Notably combined in
purple rainbow puppy pen (SW SW SW S)
which is the household name for this object, recently acquired by Kim Darnell at a local vet’s office and now added to my cabinet of curiosities display:
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Today’s Rhymes With Orange combines two cartoon memes, Psychiatrist and Elephant in the Room:
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Not the first time this combination has been drawn.
Texties are cartoon-like compositions in which a pictorial component is entirely absent or merely decorative, not essential to the point of the composition — in effect, words-only cartoons; they can be intended as humor, like gag cartoons, or as serious commentary, like political cartoons.
Two have come to me via friends on Facebook recently — both funny, both taking off on specific registers in modern printed English: the lost and found poster (in the texty “FOUND:CAKE”, or F:C), and the amazing-fact texty on the net (in the texty “[plant facts!]”, or pf!). F:C is an elaborate translation, in detail, of an item of popular culture; pf! is an undermining of the amazing-fact texty form itself.
(There will be talk of men’s bodies, among a number of other things, so you might want to exercise some caution.)
Yesterday was National Underwear Day (utilitarian garments elevated to objects of play, desire, and fashion display), today is Hiroshima Day (remembering the horror of an event of mass destruction, death, and suffering). An uncomfortable, even absurd, juxtaposition, but there is a link in the symbolism of the two occasions. In my comics feed for these occasions: four language-related cartoons on familiar language-related themes, none of them having anything to do with either underwear or nuclear holocaust, probably for good reason.
Cartoons first, then the underwear and atomic bombs.
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Three recent cartoons in my feed that depend on their readers supplying crucial bits of background cultural information: a Rhymes With Orange from the 1st (the eating habits of Japanese movie monsters); a Mother Goose and Grimm from the 1st (the His Master’s Voice dog); and today’s Bizarro/Wayno collab (clergy visiting parishioners).
In each case, the cartoon shows some situation from everyday life (which you have to know about) juxtaposed with, or translated into, another more remarkable world (which you also need to know details of).
The One Big Happy from July 5th, in which Ruthie and Joe get some dubious advice from their father:
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Their dad’s advice will no doubt warm the hearts of language teachers and multiculturalists, but it’s dubious as practical advice for everyday life.
Meanwhile, Ruthie wrestles with the question of how to get a language name from the noun doughnut / donut. Donuttish (with an all-purpose adjective-forming suffix, –ish) would certainly be possible, but, probably on the model of Dutch, Ruthie goes for Donutch, that is, Donut-ch (this is spoken, rather than written, by Ruthie, so it could have been spelled Donutsh, like Welsh).
(It tickles me to think of the language name as Dutchnut, a portmanteau of Dutch and doughnut. Or maybe that should be the name of the food.)
In any event, Ruthie has stumbled slant-wise onto the idea that doughnuts are of Dutch origin — an idea that confuses words and things, labels and the categories they label, but nevertheless incorporates a genuine bit of history.
… the science of fear and fears, to which Gary Larson made a sort of contribution in this 1988 Far Side cartoon:
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It was, of course, a joke: a term for a preposterous fear. Fear of ducks, sure, but fear that a duck is watching you? That’s a wild paranoid phobia akin to Dinsdale Piranha’s paranoid phobia of Spiny Norman, a gigantic imaginary hedgehog, in Monty Python’s “Piranha Brothers” skit.
For the most part, the joke got passed around as a joke — but without the context of its occurring in a cartoon, and in the context of the many lists of remarkable phobias you can find all over the place, the funny word and its astonishing definition have taken on a shadow life of their own.
Then, on the quibbling front, there’s the ill-formedness of anatidaephobia as the name of a phobia, any phobia, even a phobia of ducks.
A Scott Hilburn cartoon from some years back, a smileworthy garage-mechanic burlesque of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” text:
Puns on grace / grease, wretch / wrench, and all(eluia) / oil. Visually, there’s the choirstall that’s a tool box and the sacred oilcan in the stained glass window. And of course the various sorts of wrenches.
[Added on 8/2: as with many other cartoons I’ve analyzed here, this one involves a translation from one (usually everyday) world into a metaphorical world — here, between the world of church services and the world of mechanic’s shops. See my 5/22/18 posting “I (just) can’t stop (it)”.]