From several sources on the net (with no credit to a creator), this outrageous pun in a texty creation:
(#1)
You need to recognize otters (that’s easy) and know that pinochle /pínʌkǝl/ is a card game (slightly more challenging) and (most crucially) recognize the pop culture allusion, to the lyrics of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”.
… in yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
The reference to the Oscars (the Academy Awards, to be given out on March 4th) plus the name Gadot might have been enough, but just in case Mike Peters has also provided a reference to Wonder Woman — pointing us to the 2017 movie Wonder Woman, with Gal Gadot in the title role (though the movie got no Academy Award nominations at all), and providing an allusion to the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot.
The One Big Happy from January 23rd:
Ruthie reasons analogically, but from the morphological point of view, inaccurately.
If paralegal is para + legal and the para- contributes a element of meaning roughly ‘sort of, but not real’, then parakeet must be para + keet ‘a sort of, but not real, keet’, whatever a keet is. (What of parasol and parapet?)
Today’s Zippy takes us once again into a sculpture garden, this time one devoted to Zippyoid versions of Henry Moore’s sculptures:
(#1)
ZippyMoore — SurrealMoore? — is entirely abstract and is all about holes. RealMoore is full of figures (human, animal, and natural), though represented abstractly to some degree or another; and its negative spaces are significant but not omnipresent.
Case in point: the large two-part sculpture in #1.
Oh, groan. A divine pun in today’s Zippy:
Bill Griffith’s enigmatic God is a recurrent character in the strip. Today we learn about God’s BMW and how He cares for it.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, passed on to me by Susan Fischer and Lise Menn, in which giggling letters put themselves in order:
Note: they could have spelled ENLIST, INLETS, TINSEL — or in fact SILENT.
Today’s Bizarro (another Piraro/Wayno collaboration):
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
To understand the strip, you need to recognize the customer at the bar and know that finding him is a difficult enterprise; and to fully enjoy the strip, you should probably also recognize the cultural trope of the drinker at a bar who has the bartender tell people looking for him — most characteristically, his wife — that he’s not there and they haven’t seen him. (Call it the Toper in Hiding trope. The toper in hiding is a stock figure in jokes, situation comedies, and cartoons.)
The One Big Happy from January 13th, with a widespread nonstandard pronoun:
Freestanding youse /yuz/ (= you /yu/ + pl /z/) and modifying youse in youse guys ‘you guys’. In any case, a 2pl form distinct from 2sg you. The form is complexly distributed according to geography, social class, and other factors — in a way that suggests it has been invented several times in different contexts.
And then there’s the pun on used /yuzd/.
From cartoonist Dan Thompson, passed on by several people on Facebook:
(#1) /áriò/ the rock band vs. /óriò/ the cookie
The Zippy strip from the 5th:
(#1) Alfred Jarry?
A Muffler Man-style fiberglass figure: a lumberjack with an ax(e) slung over his shoulder.