In the July 29th New Yorker, two cartoons about things for American lawns, each requiring one key piece of knowledge for understanding: Bob Eckstein showing a moment of silence; Farley Katz featuring a distressed bird.
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Both cartoons are complex — several things are going on at once, including allusions to American political life — but you can’t get anywhere with them unless you recognize the repeated images in them: the shuttlecocks of the game badminton in the Epstein, the plastic lawn flamingos in the Katz.
In a recent comics feed, the 6/27 One Big Happy, with an exchange between Grandma Rose and the grotesquely smiling Avis
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In panel 2, the baggage of emotional baggage is a conventional metaphor, one no longer requiring the hearer to work out the effect of the figure and so now listed in dictionaries. But then Rose immediately brings it back from dormancy to life in a long riff of creative metaphor (in panels 2-4), composed on the spot and calling up a complex and vivid scene for the hearer.
We use the same term, metaphor, for both phenomena, and the mechanism is the same in both — but one is a historical phenomenon (whose figural character is usually out of the consciousness of speaker and hearer), while the other is a phenomenon of discourse production and comprehension in real time.
Appearing in my Facebook feed a couple of days ago, passed on by Joelle Stepien Bailard, this self-portrait of Swedish-speaking Finnish artist Tove Jansson:
(#1) Tove Jansson (1914-2001), Self-portrait in a fur hat (1941)
From my 10/19/14 posting “Tove Jansson tomorrow”:
Another multiple talent who doesn’t usually get pegged as Artist (without qualification), like many others I’ve written about on this blog (Edward Gorey, for instance). Charming but complex [Moomintroll] books for children (a favorite in our household when my daughter was young), among other things.
Two One Big Happy cartoons in which young Ruthie confronts word choices: once in the name of a food, which is yucky or not, depending on what you call it; and once in the telling of a joke you know is incredibly funny, but you have to get all the right names of things in it:
A surprise entry in the Chronicles: this Julia Suits cartoon in the (just-arrived) July 22nd New Yorker (apparently, these days, everybody is an avocadoist):
(#1) “No, you said you’d bring lemon juice!”
Lemon juice (or olive oli) acts as a protection against avocados browning on exposure to the air — a parallel to sunscreen protection.
(Note that, as in the “You complete me” cartoon — #6 in my 7/14/19 posting “Avocado Chronicles: 3 the chemical formula” — the sexes of the two avocado halves are identifiable, as male insertive (convex) vs. female receptive (concave), but in #1 it doesn’t really matter which of the two is speaking.)
As I arrange for a small Sacred Harp singing at my house in Palo Alto next month, a Bizarro from the past, this 1/10/07 strip:
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Relevant fact: SH singing is famous for being loud and harsh in tone — especially the altos, whose voices are often described as having a “glass-cutting” timbre.
Although, or perhaps because, I live in one of the world’s avocado toast hot spots, I’d hoped to avoid posting on the silly fad for avotoast, but then this Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon — with its pun on toast — appeared in my comics feed:
H2O KT is a play on Sp. aguacate ‘avocado’, treating it as:
the chemical formula H2O for agua ‘water’ + ca, the letter K /ka/, + te, the letter T /te/
that is, as la formula química del aguacate ‘the chemical formula for the avocado’. The joke isn’t quite perfect: K is indeed a symbol for a chemical element, potassium, but there’s no element T (though there is Te, the metalloid tellurium). (There is a compound potassium telluride, K2Te, but I don’t know how it interacts with water.)
The joke will lead us to the demotivational industry (with a penguin interlude); to snark and Mad magazine; to color blindness; to egg and avocado dishes; and to a sexually suggestive cartoon and its gender ideology.
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Ordinary barbers use shaving cream; clown barbers use cream pies. It’s just like spas: ordinary spas use facial creams (for moisturizing); clown spas use cream pies.
Bonus: the cartoon shows a clown barber twice over: a barber who is a clown, and also a barber for clowns.
The 6/13 One Big Happy, in my comics feed yesterday:
Philatelist as a (classical) malapropism (CM) for fatalist — an error that might on some occasion have occurred in actual speech (though I have no occurrences in my files), but which functions here entirely as a joke.
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