Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
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:
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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 »
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:
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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):
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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 »
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 »
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:
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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 »
January 24, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro collabo, on the opposition of hospitality and animosity, which I take to be an homage to Terry Jones (of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), who was released from life’s afflictions three days ago:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
Wayno’s title for the cartoon is “Putdown Service”, a play on turndown service, and that‘s an allusion to the hospitality industry.
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Posted in Compounds, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and television, Names | 2 Comments »
January 22, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro collabo, another little exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.) Wayno’s title: “Number, Please”
No doubt you recognize the speaker as Satan / the Devil / Beelzebub, but the cartoon will still be incomprehensible unless you know that there’s a particular three-digit number that’s sometimes said to belong to Satan.
Pursuing this topic on my man Jacques’s birthday, today, will lead us, through a favorite verse of his, on a circuitous route passing through a mysterious British village, Chicago, and Santa Monica, on its way to the Big Gay Village, where men hug, spoon, and screw. (There will eventually be a content warning. I’ll warn you when the screwing is imminent.)
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Humor, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
January 19, 2020
A quirky Joe Dator cartoon from the January 20th issue of the New Yorker:
(#1) “We’re not a seafood restaurant–this building has a pretty severe lobster infestation.”
NOAD‘s account of the everyday usage of infestation (with notes added by me in square brackets):
noun infestation: the presence of an unusually large number of insects or animals [not plants or microbes] in a place, typically so as to cause damage or disease [of concern to human beings]: infestation with head lice is widespread | efforts were made to deal with an infestation of rats in the building.
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Posted in Form and function, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor | 5 Comments »
January 13, 2020
(Lots of off-color jokes, some of them gay-inflected, along with a number of peanut cartoons. So: crude, and perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange — entertaining if you get the crucial pop culture allusion, incomprehensible if you don’t:
(#1) An elephant at the doctor’s office, with an x-ray showing the contents of his stomach to be a top hat, a monocle, and a cane; in the face of this evidence, the doctor asks the patient if he’s sure that all he ate was one peanut (presupposing that the patient has claimed just that)
How does this even make sense, much less be funny? Even granting the poploric association between elephants and peanuts — which is actually pretty baffling (see below) — why do peanuts come up in #1 at all? We have a trio of men’s accessories and no visible peanuts.
There’s a hint in the bonus commentary on the left: elephant to elephant, “It’s a medical Mister-y”, where the clue is Mister. But the clue is useless if you don’t know your way around the symbolic figures of American commerce.
You have to be a friend of Mister Peanut.
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Posted in Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the sexes, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
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