“Title bout”: Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Irresolvable stylistic choices? You could just punt, and avoid having to make any choice (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Actually, it’s worse that this; between panels 2 and 3, there should be 2.5:
Based off true events
Not particularly about language, but it tickled me, and these days I can use some entertainment.
From the New Yorker cartoon caption contest #708 (in the 5/18/20 issue), a pair of men — one a fuming cook, the other a man in full armor, who’s the speaker in the cartoon — confront one another during a major kitchen disaster:
(#1) (I haven’t been able to identify the artist’s signature; suggestions welcome — now identified as Sofia Warren)
The caption choices:
A “I heard dinner needed rescuing.”
B “The round table is set.”
C “Fine–next time you slay the dragon and I’ll cook.”
Today’s Zippy, another of Bill Griffith’s adventures in public art (tilted towards the whimsical and bizarre, but in fact more general than that):
(#1) Featuring the Fremont Troll in Seattle WA
Both whimsical and impossible to ignore.
Time for a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), today in a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip: Edgar Allan Poe meets the Allen wrench:
(#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 two contributions: Poe and his story “The Premature Burial”; and the Allen wrench, or hex nut, a device analogous to an ordinary screwdriver, designed to tighten or free up specially designed screws or bolts with a recessed hexagonal slot in their head.
Buried alive, with the casket top screwed or bolted down? Reach for your Allen wrench!
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, about gobs and goblets:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Liquid Economics” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Start with the straightforward stuff: goblet vs. gob, with goblet playfully treated here as if it were gob + diminutive –let.
Today’s Zippy takes us us to diner of his religion, as described in its sacred text, the Book of Norman:
(#1)
As it happens, these same characters have struck these same poses in this very diner before, but they had different things to say to one another.
Wayno’s title for today/s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, in which the world of summer scout camp for kids intersects with the complex fictional world of the animate marionette Pinocchio. To understand the cartoon, you need to recognize both of these worlds (a matter of considerable cutural knowledge); and to understand why it’s funny, you need specific detailed information about each of these worlds.
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page
The key words are kindling and fibs.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon, “Tea Time”:
(#1)
You are expected to recognize, from the title and from the drawing (showing a teapot, teacups, sugar bowl, and 3-tiered tray of fingerfood) that this depicts an afternoon tea — not tea plants in the afternoon, or merely the beverage tea taken in the afternoon, but (from NOAD):
noun tea: … 3 chiefly British a light afternoon meal consisting typically of tea to drink, sandwiches, and cakes.
But that won’t help you with the text, in which one tea sandwich asks of another (identified as female) why the latter brought Joe — Joe clearly referring to the one discordant element in the drawing, who appears to be a hamburger bun overstuffed with a meat filling, some of which has spilled out onto the table. Messy, messy Joe, who “just can’t pull himself together”.
Clearly, that one line, in conjunction with Joe’s appearance, is somehow the crux of the joke. But how?
For this, you have to know a bit about vernacular American foodstuffs, in particular the sandwich known as a sloppy joe. So it’s a pun on the name — and also, it turns out, a gender joke.
By JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), the New Yorker daily cartoon from yesterday:
“Personally, I worry that, with everyone wearing masks, readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking.”
The masks are part of daily life in plague time, and they conceal the wearers’ mouths. So in a cartoon you can’t tell who’s speaking. (In real life, there might be other clues, like vocal timbre.)
In the world of annually recurring dates, Wednesday was Earth Day, Thursday was St. George’s Day, and tomorrow is World Penguin Day. Into this olla podrida of holidays walk a pastor, a priest, a rabbi, and a pie-throwing clown working as an erotic masseur.
Colby Jones, cartooning as Sir Colby, with a meta Walk Into Bar joke; and Bob Eckstein, offering the comic amalgam of clown and masseur.
