Briefly noted. Passed on by Evan Randall Smith on 6/6 on Facebook, this Liz Climo celebration of Pride month, featuring her congenial cartoon animals:
(#1) The color sequence — white, pink, light blue; brown, black; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple — reproduces the bands of the Progress Pride flag
(There’s a Page on this blog on my postings about Climo’s work.)
An Amy Hwang cartoon in the latest — 10/23 — issue of the New Yorker that I found hugely funny, for reasons I couldn’t at first explain:
(#1)
Well, there are people who can fall asleep (pretty much) anywhere, as they say — I’ve been such a person for about 70 years now — but I have never just lain down for an impromptu nap on the ground out in the world, as the snail in #1 seems to have done, preposterously.
Actually, the cartoon snail is lying flat as a flounder, in such a way that it’s hard to be sure that it’s only somnolent and not in fact deceased. It could well be not merely sleeping, but dead — reversing the customary formula, of many applicabilities, that someone or something isn’t dead, but only sleeping. Snail3 in the cartoon looks a lot like the Monty Python pet-shop parrot: this is an ex-snail, gone to meet its maker, and its snail buddies are just slip-sliding along in denial.
So #1 is wonderfully absurd. It’s also an excellent example of a cartoon existing equally in two worlds: visually, the world of snails (lacking males, since snails are generally hermaphroditic; bereft of speech; and also exhibiting dormancy but not, apparently, actual sleep); behaviorally, the world of human beings (where Snail1 can remark that he — Snail3 — can fall asleep anywhere).
But then I was carried away into the complexities of sleep in human beings and in other creatures (where it contrasts with rest and dormancy, not to mention death) and into the behavior of snails, where I will report — surprise! — on a 2011 study from the Journal of Experimental Biology about a common pond snail:
Behavioural evidence for a sleep-like quiescent state in a pulmonate mollusc, Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus)
Pointed to Alex Norris’s Webcomic Name — that’s its name — by Max Meredith Vasilatos (to choose her web name) some years ago, I stumbled on his strip LIFE DRAWING of 10/6/17 — about, in some sense of about, genitals — which I’ll display for you in a moment. But first I need to put this strip in context.
Today’s Zippy strip, with a burlesque of a 1982 Elvis Costello song, notably covered by Chet Baker in 1987:
(#1) Zippy burlesques the first lines — Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do — and the final lines — Almost you / Almost me / Almost blue — but in the middle he goes off, not into the wild blue yonder, but, stickily, into the glue
In case you didn’t get the allusion, Bill Griffith gives us a hint with his title “Almost Chet Baker”, pointing to a remarkable performance of “Almost Blue” by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro takes us to the world of talking tennis balls, where one of them commits a bathroom pun on the noun can ‘cylindrical metal container’:
(#1) Cylindrical metal containers are highly salient to tennis balls, because such cans are how they’re sold (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, Wayno’s title for #1 — “Today’s Ballsy Cartoon” — offers a different pun, on (tennis) balls, a mildly raunchy one: ballsy ‘tough, courageous”, a derivative in –y (tricky < trick, mushy < mush, etc.) from crude slang balls ‘testicles’. And my title for this posting (“In the can”) offers another pun on cylindrical container can; from NOAD:
phrase in the can: informal on tape or film and ready to be broadcast or released: all went well, the film was in the can.
Now for some details.
From my 10/7/15 posting “Adventures in Arnoldia”, on Arnold as a name:
Wikipedia also has a list about Arnold as a given name. Real people [a list that, of course, doesn’t include me]: Arnold Stang [the actor], Arnold Palmer [the golfer], Arnold Scharzenegger [the bodybuilder and politician]. [add: Arnold Bennett the novelist, Arnold Schoenberg the composer, and Arnold Toynbee the historian] And fictional Arnolds: Arnold Rimmer (a hologram character in Red Dwarf), Arnold Ziffel (Fred Ziffel’s pig on Green Acres), Arnold Zeck (the villainous character in the Nero Wolfe books). Imagine them together as the Three Arnolds — a singing group, or a comedy team, or a gang, or whatever. Arnold Stang, Palmer, and Schwarzenegger, together for your listening enjoyment. Arnold Rimmer, Ziffel, and Zeck, the dreaded Enforcers for the Mob.
And now Arnold Peck the Human Wreck:
(#1) The fictional Arnold Peck, as drawn by Willy Murphy
On the cartoonist, from Wikipedia:
Willy Murphy (October 2, 1936 – March 2, 1976) was an American underground cartoonist. Murphy’s humor focused on hippies and the counterculture. His signature character was Arnold Peck the Human Wreck, “a mid-30s beanpole with wry observations about his own life and the community around him.”
… Murphy’s work was of the “bigfoot” style of cartooning, with characters having long, droopy noses; and was characterized by strong, humorous writing.
Schroeder to Lucy in a Peanuts comic strip from 1/27/73 (passed along on Facebook yesterday by Jeff Bowles), providing a motto that speaks to me very deeply:
“The joy is in the playing”. As it was once for me (my right hand has long been too disabled for piano-playing). Meanwhile, in Sacred Harp singing, the joy is in the singing, which I can still sort of do, and in the joining with others to sing, which I can now do only remotely, but it’s a great pleasure anyway,
Sacred Harp singing brings with it an explicit ethic of doing for its own sake and of community; the joy truly is in the singing. Which (in our ordinary custom) we do with and for one another, not for an audience (which would provide external appreciation and perhaps a kind of fame) and not for monetary reward.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:
But instead we get, unexpectedly, a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.
Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:
(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass
Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.
So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.
