Two cartoons from the May 2026 Funny Times, both with variants of familiar theme. Some Bizarro word play exploiting and extending on the similarity between names of diseases and names of flowers (commented on long ago by James Thurber); and a bob twist on Husband in Bed With Oh My God! (aka Honey, This is Not What It Looks Like).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Two for May
May 11, 2026Funeral flowers for Mr. Shimmer
May 2, 2026In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:
(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist
Chant for a mailing tube
April 25, 2026Yesterday’s (4/24) Zippy strip has our Pinhead singing the praises of everyday stationery supplies, in particular the cylinders (now usually made of plastic) used to convey rolled-up sheets of material with printing or designs on them: the telescoping plastic mailing tube:
Zippy chants for the TPMT
Four words of decreasing length (in number of syllables), in two phrases:
— the adjectival modifiers telescoping ‘which telescopes’ and plastic ‘which is made of plastic’ (4 + 2 syllables)
— and the head compound noun mailing tube ‘tube for mailing things’ (2 + 1 syllable)
Thereby achieving the effect of building to a final one-syllable bang.
The sno cone
April 18, 2026Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring:
Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Focusing on form rather than content
April 15, 2026In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:
(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.
Long Island, duck!
April 14, 2026Today’s (4/14) Zippy strip has our Pinhead in conversation with a giant cement duck:
(#1) An anatine day in Southampton
The contrary opinion
April 2, 2026In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions
Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).
The routine tasks of a vengeful God
March 28, 2026From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:
The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites
It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.
In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
The black service window in space
March 28, 2026In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole:
(#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space
Two things: the service window; the black hole.
Animated families
March 18, 2026In the Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for 3/16/26, two characters from Disney animation commiserate in a bar: Dopey (the least of the Seven Dwarfs in Disney’s telling of the Snow White tale from the Brothers Grimm) with a mug of beer, Goofy (the canine companion of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a long series of short features) doing shots. If you don’t recognize who they are and what their names are, the cartoon is incomprehensible, because the dwarf and the dog are sharing their regret at the names their parents gave them:
What kind of parent would name their son Dopey or Goofy? Those are epithets, not ordinary names, and while the names of all seven dwarfs are actually (evocative) epithets, Goofy hangs with his buddies Mickey and Donald (who have alliterative, but not epithetic, names), so he can feel especially aggrieved (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The Seven Dwarfs are a band of miners, in both the Grimm and Disney telling of the tale of Snow White, and though they all must have had parents, we know nothing about them; the dwarfs just materialize in their little house, in need of a housekeeper’s touch. The Disney comic animals have vaguely delineated, largely unseen families; about them we know little. Goofy appears to be the screw-up child in his family. And ended up getting called by an epithet.
Well, Goofy began life as Dippy Dawg, again with an unflattering epithet. (My father, with whom I shared a name, sailed through his adult life addressed by an epithet, not his name: the positive-vibe epithet Zip, alluding to his pleasant energy.)