In begins with (the wildly hyperbolic) jockstrap frenzy (in an ad featuring notable male buttocks), followed by some playfulness that treats jockstrap frenzy as a laughable absurdity, turns to raw, terrifying frenzy, then the specialized zones of murder frenzy / frenzy murder and feeding frenzy, concluding with the ecstatic state of sexual frenzy (in a section not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; I’ll issue a warning when we get to the really raunchy stuff — though from the outset this posting is suffused with sexual matters not to the taste of some of my readers).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Further adventures in Arnoldia
May 26, 2024From 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.
The joy is in the playing
May 26, 2024Schroeder 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.
The marine biologist on duty
May 25, 2024Today’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.
The cocktail of the absurd
May 22, 2024Breezed 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.
More Kix on Route 66
May 21, 2024Passed 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.]
Shrink me, doctor!
May 19, 2024Today’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)
A Friday punmanteau
May 17, 2024In 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)
From the annals of attentional focus
May 14, 2024The 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:
Blutonic dialogue
May 13, 2024In 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)