Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
May 21, 2024
Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2024
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
May 17, 2024
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, the punning portmanteau pontiff no return:
pontiff ‘the Pope’ + point of no return ‘point at which turning back is no longer possible’ = pontiff no return ‘the Pope will not return (for some time)’ in a simplified register — foreigner talk, caveman talk, Tonto talk, etc. (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2024
The Zits strip of 5/12, in which Jeremy invests an enormous amount of time and attention devising a remarkable hammock leisure environment for himself — something really important to him — while neglecting to wash any of his dishes, not even rinsing out his cereal bowl — something routine and of no significance to him. His attentional focus in on the cool stuff, the stuff he cares about, while he neglects the everyday stuff, which he views as just a nuisance (well, to look ahead, it’s just a nuisance because it’s a woman’s job):
There seem to be (at least) five elements — they’re all of highly context- and culture-bound and they’re often at odds with one another — that can contribute to the personal value of a task to someone doing it and can therefore engage their attentional focus:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
May 13, 2024
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Blutonic dialogue: an encounter in which a young woman discusses a platonic relationship with an apparently tamed (and clearly dismayed) incarnation of the villainous and brutal Bluto from the Popeye comics and animations:
(#1) A pun on platonic relationship (NOAD: adj. platonic: (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Wayno’s title: “The Mistaken Mariner” — simple friendship not being what Bluto had in mind.
Meanwhile, there’s my Blutonic dialogue, a pun on Platonic dialogue:
Plato wrote approximately 35 dialogues, in most of which Socrates is the main character. (Wikipedia link)
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Philosophy, Puns | Leave a Comment »
May 7, 2024
In Pinterest this morning, Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater comic strip of 9/25/20:
(#1) This from the creator of the Puns of Steel collections
#1 is a still from a sad tale of chickpeas smashed to death in a cheap Baltimore apartment, an episode of the tv drama Hummuscide: Life on the Street; meanwhile, death strikes down a rich legume in the novel The Great Garbanzo, in which the title character is murdered by a distraught husband. The grand fictions of Cicer arietinum.
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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »
May 6, 2024
From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:
(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Male art, Masculinity, Myths | 2 Comments »
May 5, 2024
… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Dance, Folklore, French, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
May 4, 2024
(or maybe his gay cartoon world. either way, this posting gets right into men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain talk, so it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Encountered on Pinterest some time ago, an item from the Jason Lloyd Art website, with a work much like this one, two men in the act (but without a visible penis, so I can show it to you here):
(#1) “Just Relax” — I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 hit song is an inevitable association here — is about taking pleasure in getting fucked, and it’s in JL’s least cartoonish and most realistic (but soft-focus) style, which can be either simply erotic (and touching) or actually pornographic (and arousing), depending on how you approach it
All of JL’s work is at least somewhat simplified in its lines, and most of it is straightforwardly cartooning, all of it skilled, some of it notable.
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Posted in Captions, Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Male art | 2 Comments »
April 27, 2024
So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:
Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).
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Posted in Derivation, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
