Two whoa cartoons this morning, a simple Bizarro and a complex Zippy.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
whoa!
June 10, 2014Assorted cartoons
June 7, 2014A recent accumulation: a Scott Hilburn strip with a pun; a Zits on X-free foods; a very meta Zippy; and a Pearls Before Swine with heavy use of implicature.
Ralph Steadman
June 6, 2014I start with today’s Doonesbury (a replay from some years ago), continuing the story of Duke’s coming out of a drug coma:
(#1)
In the previous installment, Duke was hallucinating a talking lizard (right out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is where his cartoon character originates). Now he’s playing on the name of that book: Fear and Loathing at Macy’s Men’s Wear.
Time for some words on the amazing F&L and on its illustrator (the lizard source) Ralph Steadman.
Briefly noted: decline
June 5, 2014From Bruce Handy’s “Comic Relief: Bob Mankoff’s ‘How About Never — Is Never Good for You?’ ” in the NYT Book Review on the 1st (on Mankoff’s book, see here):
To the perennial gripe that the [New Yorker] cartoons aren’t as funny as they used to be [a complaint sometimes ventilated in comments on this blog], Mankoff’s short answer is: “They never were.” It’s true. I conducted another experiment, pulling three random issues of the magazine off local library shelves, from 1933, 1965 and 1997; each batch of vintage cartoons produced the same amount of chuckles, snorts of recognition, mehs, groans and huh?’s as would those in any recent issue (minus jokes at the expense of Africans, Native Americans, Gypsies, Jews and wives who won’t shut up). Mankoff believes that people tend to forget cartoons they didn’t like, remembering only the keepers, which gives the past a perpetual leg up.
Selective memory strikes again.
I’ve gone back over years of New Yorker cartoons and had the same experience as Handy. In fact, some older and celebrated cartoonists — Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson, for example — never entertained me much at all.
Four for the fourth
June 5, 2014My morning mail on Wednesday the 4th brought me six suitable cartoons for this blog. Two I have already posted about: a Doonesbury with Duke hallucinating a lizard; and a Bizarro with a diner asking for eggs without any sense of style. The others: a One Big Happy on the attractions of “diet” versions of foods; a Zits on hearing and listening; a Zippy with (among other things) more better; and a Mother Goose and Grimm with a symbolic ambiguity.
In style
June 4, 2014This morning’s Bizarro:
The diner is asking for eggs in one of the handful of standard named American styles — scrambled, poached, fried (over or sunny side up), boiled (hard- or soft-) — and not in some “fancy” style, whether in French (eggs/oeufs à/a la Florentine), in English with postposed modifier (eggs Florentine style, eggs Florentine), or in English with preposed modifier (Florentine-style eggs, Florentine eggs).
Hallucinations and delusions
June 4, 2014An avalanche of linguistically relevant cartoons this morning. I’ll pick out a few individually, then post a collection. First, an old Doonesbury, relevant to one of the occasions of the week in my house, the anniversary of my husband-equivalent Jacques’s death in 2003; the relevance will soon become clear.
Coping with the new
June 2, 2014In today’s One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe are back on the track of trying to make sense of things they haven’t heard before:
(#1)
Lots of knowledge needed here — about the words of English and about sociocultural conventions:
May-June turnover
June 1, 2014A One Big Happy from yesterday (May 25), on conversational organization; and then three from this morning’s (June 1st) crop: a Bizarro with an ambiguity introduced by truncation; yet another meta-Zippy, this time on reports of Zippy’s death; and a Rhymes With Orange with a pun from the Black Lagoon.
What are they?
May 30, 2014Two recent items that challenge the borders of categories in the world of art, literature, and humor: another Jane Austen quote (yes, Chris Ambidge keeps sending them on); and an e-card (passed on by Victor Steinbok because of the entertaining portmanteau on it).