The 1/11 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro displays the intersection of two cartoon worlds:
— a polar cartoon world of winter and cold, populated by stereotypical Eskimos and anthropomorphic polar bears, penguins, and (directly relevant here) snowmen (or, more generally, snowfolk)
— a tropical cartoon world of sun and surf, populated by stereotypical tropical islanders (especially Hawaiians), surfers, and the clientele of tiki bars
Sketchbook / Cat People / By Bob Eckstein and Nava Atlas. Famous authors and their beloved feline companions.
From Ursula LeGuin through Patricia HighsmithBob Eckstein is a best-selling author and the world’s only snowman expert. His new book is “The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway)”.
Nava Atlas is a cookbook author and the creator of Literary Ladies’ Guide.
(You’ll need to embiggen the image to appreciate the pleasures of the text.)
(Definitely a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, signaling that I’m still here, after several deeply awful days of medical afflictions — an experience I’ll record in a separate posting, rather than get in the way of an egregious pun for today’s celebration of the Three Magi.)
To get the joke in this Epiphany texty circulating on Facebook (hat tip to Evan Randall Smith) you have to supply background from two (unrelated) domains of cultural knowledge — (A) the Christian mythic tale of the Three Wise Men and the gifts they bring to the baby Jesus; and (B) the pop-cultural splendor of the Boardwalk product pitch famously used by tv adman Billy Mays:
(#1) To understand the thing at all, you need to know (A); but if you don’t know (B), there’s no joke, just a flat-footed recital of the Wise Men’s gifts
(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:
(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation
These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for New Year’s Eve Eve is a goofy amalgam of two different cartoon memes with an egregious pun;Â Wayno’s title is “Reclusive Russets” (russets being a type of potato). No, of course it doesn’t cohere; that’s what makes it delightful (remember that this strip is called Bizarro).
(#1) If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.
The Potato Head meme (all three characters are Potato Heads) and the seeker and the seer meme (one character is seeker, the other two seers), plus some CRAB / CARB play on the compound noun hermit crab, mountain-top seers being hermits who have removed themselves from ordinary life, and potatoes being carbs, specifically starches (complex carbohydrates )
A modest challenge to cartoon understanding in the 12/17 Rhymes With Orange, which depends on your knowing about a bit of antique technology and its metaphorical name in English. Price and Piccolo have strewn hints around in the cartoon, but still, if you’re not familiar with the crucial piece of technology, you won’t get the joke.
(#1) Two rabbits sit in odd positions on a couch (with their ears standing up), in front of a screen
Clues to understanding, beyond the peculiar postures: the references to reception (in the title of the strip), specifically to tv reception (via cable); the reference to Gramps, evoking the old days; Gramps’s claim that their postures are somehow conducive to the point of their activity.
Suppose you’re a cartoonist, and this POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) has, well, popped into your head:
eggs Benedict Arnold = eggs Benedict  (breakfast dish of sliced ham on English muffin with hollandaise sauce) + Benedict Arnold (American general who defected to the British during the Revolutionary War)
Can you work this (entertainingly) surprising juxtaposition of elements into a cartoon?
Today, Mike Peters (of Mother Goose and Grimm) took up the challenge:
(#1) The solution is a play on traitor: an egg dish named for a traitor, sold at a place named Traitor Joe’s — with a trader / traitor pun alluding to the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a perfect pun for most Americans, for whom trader and traitor are homophones; a clever imperfect pun for everyone else
Sweet. Meanwhile, others have labored to devise variants of eggs Benedict that are somehow associable with Benedict Arnold.
(There will be plain talk, in street language, about sexual acts, so this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
From Richard Hershberger (passed on to me by David Kathman), this 1920 magazine ad:
(#1) Hershberger’s comment: Run a Google image search on “Santa Claus cigarette” and a startling number of results pop up. This one is my favorite, as Santa clearly is taking a smoke while in the afterglow.
Things to talk about: postorgasmic afterglow; Turkish tobacco; Murad cigarettes; the ad campaign for the cigarettes by Rea Irvin; graphic artist Rea Irvin. First the sex, then the smokes — starting with the tobacco, in a chain of topics where each leads to the next.
Following on yesterday’s “Elfshelfisms” posting, on The Elf on the Shelf book and the scout-elf toy and on elf on a shelf visual riddling (lemur on a femur etc.),  brief adventures of shelf elves at play: in the Nasty Elf genre of playful folk depictions of scout elves posed doing nasty, gross, and raunchy things (depictions passed around on the net the way variants of a joke form are passed around by word of mouth); and in human ShelfElfin figures engaged in similar play (specifically in soft porn, those naughty hunky boys).
… the Christmas penguins embrace:
(#1) In the sky, the green shimmer of an aurora; on the ground, a parent penguin nurtures their young one (in a green knitted cap)
The image comes to me from Joel Levin (one of the most faithful readers of this blog) for my collection of penguiniana. It came to him in a corporate holiday card from Fidelity Investments, where its visual message of parental care was sandwiched between conventional holiday greetings:
Wishing you a magical holiday
[Fidelity Penguin gif]
Here’s to all the good things the season brings.
