Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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The therapist is in French

April 20, 2020

The following cartoon, in French and unattributed, has been making its way around Facebook in the last few days:


(#1) “How do you [polite] feel this week?” – “Much better.”

Therapist and patient, both cowering in the anxiety of persecution. But this week is better. Much better.

Presumably, it’s being passed around as a pointed commentary on the fix we are all in currently. Even better is appalling.

It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that #1 is a rip-off of a Bizarro cartoon: the drawing style, the content (the Psychiatrist meme is a Bizarro evergreen favorite), the two odd Dan Piraro symbols. And so it is, from 2/15/11, almost a decade ago.

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Posted in Address terms, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | 2 Comments »

Quick shot: return to 24th St.

April 19, 2020

It’s about diners. It’s about cartoons. It’s about San Francisco. Obviously, it’s about Zippy the Pinhead (from 4/15):


(#1) Yes, some of us left our hearts in San Francisco, but Zippy left his pants

This being a Zippy strip, you are guaranteed that this is a real place; in fact, it’s a pretty famous one (though now closed down, of course). And not only is Zippy returning to 2801 24th St. in SF, we as cartoon readers are returning to this very scene, but with different dialogue.

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Posted in Diners, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Quick shot: no creme for Godzilla

April 18, 2020

Yesterday’s Weekly Humorist cartoon “Missing Something?” by Bob Eckstein:


(#1) In the Godzilla cartoon meme, saurian movie monsters exhibit their famous appetite for pieces of the urban landscape, especially mass transit vehicles

But a bus or train with no passengers inside is like the hollow shell of a chocolate candy, with no nuts, no buttercream, no nougat, no candied cherry, nothing whatsoever in it. Or like the two chocolate biscuits of an Oreo cookie just rubbing together, with no creme filling.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The Grim Mouser

April 16, 2020

The 4/13 Rhymes With Orange brings us the Grim Reaper and his cats (we know from Terry Pratchett that Death is fond of cats):

(#1)

We don’t know if this Grim Reaper is a general operator, reaping souls of many creatures, including mice; or whether this one is a specialist in mice — perhaps of a tribe, or race, of Grim Mousers; or of a professional guild of them. (See below, on the Death of Rats.)

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Eponyms, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The labors of Corónsyphùs

April 13, 2020

Bob Eckstein today in Wired:


(#1) The Sísyphùs of the corónavìrus, always at his labors

A natural cartoon idea, which many have latched onto.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Martin Van Buren, feeding nachos to a hyperactive squirrel

April 10, 2020

Yesterday’s Zippy has Our Pinhead imagining empathetically identifying with Grover Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Zappa, Martin Van Buren, … and a (particular) squirrel:


(#1) The title of the set piece in Zippy’s dream — “Martin Van Buren, Feeding Nachos to a Hyperactive Squirrel” — uses a familiar syntactic template for describing scenes

This is the world of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer”.

Meanwhile, Zippy engages in a mental exercise that has absorbed philosophers of consciousness for about 50 years, as distilled in the title of an influential paper by Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Philosophy, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Messin’ with words

April 8, 2020

The One Big Happy from 3/17, in which Ruthie and Joe perform some silly word play together, with Ruthie taking off on the word rattle on a spelling test for Joe:


(#1) Ruthie jokingly — note the expression on her face – interprets /rætǝl/ as Rat’ll ‘Rat will’ (with Auxiliary Reduction; see the previous posting on this blog, “It’s … it’s … it’s …”, about AuxRed)

Ruthie’s move, with a reference to Rat, provokes a grinning follow-up from Joe, who counters with a reference to Pig and some mildly naughty slang evoking U.S. black talk. They high-five in triumph. A sudden upwelling of urban street culture (and a pop-cutural cartoon allusion) in the midst of a spelling test. Their father patiently presses on.

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Posted in Gesture, Language and the body, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Slang, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The Desert Island Psychiatrist

April 5, 2020

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)

You notice the empty clinical couch, with its colorful pillow, because it’s the biggest thing in the drawing, and it’s right in the middle of it. You notice the psychiatrist, because he’s a human figure, of some size, with a significant face (our attention is drawn powerfully to faces).

Only then do you follow the therapist’s gaze and take in the little figure in the lower righthand corner: the tiny castaway under a miniature palm tree, on a desert island — charmingly presented as being in a colorful planter, so that it’s also one of the plants in routine office decor, matched by the ornamental foliage in the planter in the opposite corner.

We are both in a Desert Island cartoon and also in a Psychiatrist cartoon (where the therapist is doing shrink-talk), set in a stereotypical psychiatrist’s office (notably medical, down to the framed diplomas on the wall).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

Keep lettin’ him snooze

April 3, 2020

In the One Big Happy from 3/11, Ruthie belts her heart out for her dolls:


(#1) An intentional parody — well, burlesque, or travesty — performed with great enthusiasm by Ruthie

Look at the first panel of the cartoon. If the prosody of the first line, “Keep lettin’ him snooze”, doesn’t clue you in to the song being parodied, then maybe the diambic last line of the first stanza, “No spoon, one fork”, will do the trick. Or… you can wait for the last stanza, in the fourth panel, where Ruthie gives it to you straight.

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Posted in Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The triune Emperor of the Swamp: a muskrat, a fox, and a bear

April 3, 2020

The swamp is Pogo’s Okefenokee, and its emperor has three faces: Deacon Mushrat (a muskrat and a moral monster); Seminole Sam (a grifter fox); and P.T. Bridgeport (a huckster bear). Powerful members of the emperor’s inner circle include Mole MacCarony (aka Molester Mole) and Simple J. Malarkey, a malevolent wildcat.


(#1) The Deacon, Malarkey, and Mole (plus Mole’s minions, the bats Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred) at a 5/6/53 meeting of the Jack Acid Society

I found myself pulled into this world by Lisa Cohen, who wrote on Facebook on 3/31 that she’d just heard someone on the radio referring to [REDACTED] as a rabid muskrat, which made her suddenly feel more cheerful. Indeed.

The reference to metaphorically fanatical muskrats immediately, of course, called to mind Deacon Mushrat [Muskrat], a hypocritical conservative who speaks in Gothic text (as above), in Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. And from that everything else fell out.

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »

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