The grim tale of the shoe elves who got wasted on ale and were baked into a bro pie by the evil shoemaker’s wife — I embroider a bit here — as condensed by Wayno and Piraro in their 11/7 Bizarro strip:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page. Two of these, the Pie of Opportunity and the Lost Loafer, figure in the actual content of the cartoon and will be duly attended to in a moment.)
The Bizarro Bros have folded a fair number of things into this cartoon, starting with the bro mindset and the slang nouns dude and bro, going on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in particular the tale of the elves and the shoemaker, and incorporating shoes from both Grimm and Bizarro, plus Greek pie, and I don’t mean spanakopita.
From my 11/17/18 posting (exactly a year ago) “Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day”, with this Bizarro cartoon:
(#1)
I was moved to declare November 17th Teddy Bear Picnic Day …, but it turns out that (by whatever obscure mechanism these things happen) July 10th is already taken for this occasion … [however:] Elizabeth acceded to the English throne on November 17th, 1558, so that today is unquestionably Elizabeth I Accession Day. From a Princeton Triangle Club show from a great many decades ago, the anthem for today:
I’m Elizabeth the First / Say it if you durst / I’m a hell of a queen!
I’m now thinking of (Elizabeth’s) Accession Day as Hell of a Queen Day — a much more versatile concept.
Today’s Zippy, with a catfish buffet in the Toad Suck / Toadsuck AR area:
(#1) Buffet at the Toadsuck Catfish Inn (in Choctaw AR, on US 65 South), obviously of keen interest to Mr. (The) Toad
As is so often the case with establishments in Zippy strips, this one closed a few years ago — though alternatives, like Eat My Catfish in Conway, flourish in the area (which is prime catfish territory).
(#1) If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page. Meanwhile, the pie segments run through the flavors in the order named, clockwise from the pumpkin segment at the top.
Transpositional wordplay of an especially simple sort, involving a two-word expression, with X Y ~ Y X — in this case taking off from a conventional N + N compound, the metaphorical pie chart ‘chart resembling a pie’, and reversing the parts to yield the novel, and entertaining, (also metaphorical) compound chart pie ‘pie resembling a chart’.
The model expression pie chart refers to an object familiar in our culture, while the play expression chart pie refers to something novel and surprising: a pie made up of segments drawn from various different pies. Not a combination or mixed pie, like the familiar strawberry rhurbarb pie — a kind of hybrid pie — but instead a composite (‘made up of various parts or elements’ (NOAD) or chimerical pie, with distinct parts taken from different pies. (On chimeras, see my 11/13 posting “The chimera of Faneuil Hall”.)
Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to the Boston waterfront and a piece of remarkable antic public art:
(#1)
A chimera — a composite of parts of a Boston lobster (those claws!) and parts of Mickey Mouse (all the rest, but especially the ears), let’s portmanteau him Lobstickey Mouse — who stood for a couple of years by Faneuil Hall on the Boston waterfront.
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Cyrillic label hints at сардинкы (transliteration in Latin letters: sardinky/i) ‘little sardines’, with a hard sign Ъ added to allow an allusion to one of those odd symbols. Meanwhile, the title tsardines is a portmanteau, of tsar and sardines, referring to the five tsars of Russia packed like sardines into the tin.
(Yes, full appreciation of the cartoon requires assembling a fair amount of knowledge of several kinds, starting with sardines and their customary packaging.)
A recent — 10/7 — One Big Happy has Ruthie willfully misunderstanding a usage, something she does every so often, sometimes as a joke, usually to annoy her brother Joe:
(#1) Joe asks about /plen/ plane vs. plain, and Ruthie mischievously shifts to a pun on /pléɪn/ playin’.
Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)
In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:
noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro wordless Bizarro collabo (titled “Confirmed” by Wayno), on one of the two pop-culturally celebrated activities of bears in the woods (picknicking being the other one):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
According to this cartoon, bears do indeed, as the idiom has it, shit in the woods, but not indiscriminately. Instead, there are designated defecation sites, alongside those facilities — gender-marked portable toilets — specifically for people to shit in the woods; the ones for bears, however, are open-defecation sites (in Bizarro-World, at least).
As it happens, bears have often been cartooned in the woods, especially when bent on defecation; the idiom, both wry and dirty, is irresistibly attractive to humorists.
