Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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Where your personalities go when you’re having sex

February 27, 2020

Will McPhail (in a New Yorker “Daily Shouts” piece on 7/1/18) thinks they socialize pleasantly with one another — have a coffee together, play pingpong, eat hot dogs, shoot some hoops — while speculating wryly about how you’re managing without them and fretting poignantly about when they can get back to helping you through your lives.

All about sex, but with two feet as the only bodyparts depicted and the verb bounce as the only sexually tinged vocabulary. Unfolding in a cartoon of ten gentle, unhurried panels featuring two wraith-like personalities, one blue-green, one red-purple.

(After the McPhail I’ll write a bit about sexual ecstasy as an altered state of consciousness, with a link to some decidedly hard-core writing about sex at the gay baths, but with no actual raunch here.)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology | Leave a Comment »

A priest, a rabbit, and a minister

February 26, 2020

… walk into a bar. And into a Walk Into Bar joke, which then goes doubly meta. The rabbit brings a really big beer to the event. The joke has been around in print, in one form or another, for maybe 20 years. The image is a fantasist painting “Bunny with Beer” (from 2017) by the artist Omar Rayyan. The two joined in happy union by an unknown hand, during the past few days, in the form of a texty cartoon:

(#1)

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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Words and things | 2 Comments »

Ho, ho, the three of clubs

February 24, 2020

It’s all ultimately about comedy duos. Two cartoons from today’s feed: a Zippy — Ho Hos in the forest primeval — that’s a reprise (with fresh variations) of an old strip; and a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — show me the card, teller — that’s incomprehensible unless you have a piece of popular-culture knowledge:

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

While you’re up

February 22, 2020

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Venture Fish crawls out onto land, no doubt to return after foraging there, then will venture onto land again, and in time its descendants will have become amphibians, and then, well, you know the story.

But why does Venture Fish go on land? It insists on doing this for some reason — the primary reason for the act —  that is inscrutable to its aquatic companion, but Home Fish asks that Venture Fish meanwhile run an errand: fetch some things on the trip, thus supplying an additional, secondary reason for the act.  Home Fish uses the format BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST:

BACKGROUND CONDITION: If you’re going out / Since you’re already up / As long as you’re up / While you’re up / …

+ REQUEST: (could you / would you / why don’t you / please /…) VP-BSE

— made famous in the slogan for an early 1960s ad campaign:

as long as you’re up get me a Grant’s

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Posted in Art, Evolution, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Memory | Leave a Comment »

The Dread Pirate Swisserhand

February 7, 2020

A Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon from 2012:


(#1) Not just the pirate captain of legend — Captain Hook from Peter Pan — with his hook, but one with a whole Swiss Army knife of tools as his (right) hand, in the spirit of Edward Scissorhands (this is where the prisoner says, “That’s funny, you don’t look Swiss”)

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »

I made some art

February 5, 2020

Passed on by John McIntyre, this poignant, or even mordant, eat the rich comic:


(#1) Artie (the artist) and Audie (his audience)

A possible continuation: in panel 5, Artie reluctantly says yes; and in panel 6, Audie goes, well, then, it’s not worth anything, so forget it.

Lessons in modern culture: one, the (only) reason to create things is to make money; and two, to survive, a creator has to sell themselves and their product.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Slogans | 2 Comments »

The missing

February 3, 2020

The Rhymes With Orange on the 1st takes us into two worlds, the somewhat fantastical Laundry World and, in the parallel everyday world, with the missing persons bureau in a city police department:

(#1)

You need to recogize the interior of a modern clothes dryer, containing three socks — socks that are also three people, two cops and someone searching for a person who has disappeared. And then to fully appreciate the cartoon, you need recognize the legendary figure of the Lost Sock, which links the two worlds.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »

Revisiting 42: stalked by a giant anthropomorphic squirrel

February 1, 2020

When we last saw Mr. Peanut (in my 1/13/20 posting “Just one peanut”), he was tortured by nightmares of being buried alive by an anthropomorphic squirrel:

(#1)

That squirrel has now come alive in a giant toothy form and is stalking the Mr. Peanut of the Apocalypse on the city streets, in this David Sipress cartoon (from the February 3rd New Yorker):

(#2)

Entertaining. But much funnier when you know that the cartoon is exquisitely topical: Mr. Peanut has in fact just met his death (though not as the prey of a giant squirrel), and will be mourned at the Super Bowl tomorrow.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

Identify that potato

January 31, 2020

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, posing a puzzle in cartoon understanding:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page.)

Ok, you need to recognize the Potato Heads; the cartoon takes place in a world of Potato Heads, with their removable and interchangeable features. But it takes place simultaneously in the everyday world, or at least this world as represented in American popular culture — so we’re expected to recognize this as a police station, with a Wanted poster on the wall and a uniformed (male) cop at a desk, holding the detached head of a PH (Potato Head). He’s engaged with a (female) citizen, who looks at the head and, mustache in her hand, says “That’s close, but can we try it again with the mustache?”

Ok, so she wants to see the PH head with the mustache added to it. Why? And why would that be funny?

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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Predicative / locational

January 26, 2020

(In the illustrations section below, there are some racy images; just a warning for the sexually modest.)

From the annals of ambiguity: the Mother Goose and Grimm from the 20th:

(#1)

Both terms of the ambiguity are of interest on their own: short-form location names (as in Men’s Fragrances in Meet us in Men’s Fragrances, with the PP in Men’s Fragrances functioning as a VP adverbial, referring to the place of the meeting) vs. (subject-oriented) predicative adjuncts (as in Meet us without a shirt, with the PP without a shirt functioning to denote some characteristic — here, shirtlessness — of the referent of the subject).

Mother Goose intended the VP location adverbial reading of in Women’s Dresses, where Women’s Dresses is the name of a department in a department store (readers are expected to know, even these days, what department stores are and how they are organized and labeled). The dogs Grimm and Ralph understood instead the predicative adjunct reading of in women’s dresses, and so they appeared wearing women’s dresses, outré though that might be.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Phallicity, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

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