Archive for the ‘Understanding comics’ Category

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Charlie on the couch

April 20, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon with a stylized tunafish on the couch:


(#1) To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the patient’s not any old tuna, but Charlie, the celebrity mascot for the StarKist brand, whose widely advertised decades-long goal in life is to taste good (while — sorry, Charlie — his pursuit of good taste constantly frustrates this ambition, an experience that seems have led him to seek therapy) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

There’s a surprisingly rich history here (but one that might be specifically North American, so that the cartoon might be baffling to many of my readers). Summarized in this entry on the tv tropes site:

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Posted in Catchphrases, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

The Tunnel of Self-Love

April 16, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:


(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.

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Posted in Art, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Myths, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Big Mama Annie and her little boy

April 13, 2024

Following up on yesterday’s pun cartoon by Scott Hilburn (in the posting “Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged”), I looked at his (huge) portfolio of pun cartoons for others I hadn’t already posted on that were worthy of note, found several candidates I was mulling over (though I had quickly become sated with puns), and then ran aground on one I just didn’t really get:


(#1) Well, there’s evidence — the name Annie, that mop of curly red hair — that it involves Little Orphan Annie as a grown woman, with a young son, who she says can’t come out and play with the other boys today, but trills in song that her son will be coming out tomorrow, which is clearly a pun on sun, so there are all those parts, with a pun smack in the middle of the action, but it doesn’t hang together as a joke

But all the pointers are to Annie, the musical based on the comic strip, in which case it makes sense that I don’t get the joke, since I’m one of a select band of people who find the musical cloyingly unwatchable and consequently don’t recognize its songs, not even the plucky tyke’s anthem “Tomorrow” (which, it seems, is enormously popular; in preparing this posting, I have, alas, watched a number of performances of it, so that my judgment of it has crystallized to solid detestation). But, as I frequently note on this blog, if you don’t know the cultural context for the joke in a cartoon, you won’t understand the cartoon.

This time the ignorant cluck who didn’t get the joke was me. (Apparently, a large part of the Anglophone world recognizes the song.)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes

April 9, 2024

Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).

Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still  appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The final 5 Hot Days of Christmas

March 5, 2024

(Very heavy on gay content, with a number of raunchy allusions, so not to everyone’s taste.)

I’m well aware that Christmas was over two months ago, but this is a complex posting and  my life’s been full of, um, challenges. In any case, I’m finally finishing up Dean Allemang’s series of AI-generated Christmas-card designs for the 12 days as in the carol, all of them sent as titillating presents for me. The early ones had one hot hunk, an object of gay sexual desire (Dino and I share a sexual orientation, and in fact a sexual history), as a central figure, with multiples of the gift of the day (birds or those golden rings) as accompaniments; but from there on it’s multiple men: for days 6 and 7, in my 1/11 posting “Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans”, the dudes are figurative birds; for days 8 (maids a-milking) and 9 (ladies dancing), Dino just switched sexes (milkmen, laddies dancing); the last three days have male gifts in the carol (10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping, 12 drummers drumming), but Dino has found fresh, jokey, interpretations for all three.

(Note: once things shifted to multiple hunks, Dino’s prompts for suitable images tended to turn up clone-like variants of the same basic guy, just differently posed and dressed. So we’ll be seeing a few of these studs again and again; some people find this effect creepy, some find it really hot, I toggle back and forth between the two reactions.)

Now: for background, a look back at the turning point in this carnival of images, the geese a-laying (day 6) and swans a-swimming (day 7). With some comments from Dino about the craft of prompting for suitable images (which can then be further massaged with image-processing software); there’s a lot of art in all of this.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Puns, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

You’ve been seeing other fish

February 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the little month of February (which stretches this year to 29 days), beginning unfortunately in these parts in cold rains that will last for a week, and (this morning) in low air pressure that makes my joints so painful that I can barely get this posting typed and has depressed my vital signs (blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature) so much that I’m light-headed, unsteady on my feet, and muzzy-minded (the upside is that low air pressure inevitably goes on to rise, so that if I can hang on a while things will get better)

But I’m not dead yet, and (for reasons I don’t understand) I’m not at all depressed — low air pressure often causes me to break into weeping in despair at the slightest provocation, and the unbroken gloom of these days would test anyone — just pissed off at being so incapacitated.

My morning has been cheered by today’s Rhymes With Orange comic strip (involving a talking pet fish and its keeper), which plays in a surprising way with two of the many verb senses of see:

Minimal lexicographic facts about the senses of see involved in this strip, from NOAD:

verb see: 1 [a] perceive with the eyes; discern visually … 4 [a] meet (someone one knows) socially or by chance … [c] meet regularly as a boyfriend or girlfriend

On hearing “You’ve been seeing other fish”, most people would understand it to be conveying sense 4c (for reasons I’ll explore below); what’s funny is that the strip sets things up — via three pieces of evidence that the keeper has just been to an aquarium, a place people go to to watch fish — so that we will take the fish to be using the unexpected sense 1a: surprise!

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Posted in Aktionsart, Ambiguity, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Seaman Apprentice Crunch

January 4, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding, today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro strip, which is incomprehensible if you don’t know a crucial piece of American popular culture (and Wayno’s title, “The Early Years”, won’t be much help to you):


(#1) Someday Seaman Apprentice Crunch will command his own ship, and then he’ll be Captain Crunch, familiarly known as Cap’n Crunch, and he’ll give that name to a sweet breakfast cereal that American kids have been enjoying for 60 years (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Note that Crunch is drinking from an 8-ounce milk carton (while his naval companion is having a beer).

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

I’ll take Manhattan

December 13, 2023

An Ellis Rosen pun cartoon (which came by me on Facebook this morning) in which ER manages to treat Manhattan, the name of the island that’s one of the boroughs of New York City, as a pun on Manhattan, the name of the cocktail (made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters). This is a signal achievement in joke puns, managed by exploiting Godzilla / Gojira, from the Japanese movies, a radioactive prehistoric reptilian monster with a ravenous appetite for urban infrastructure, especially city buildings and large vehicles:


The cartoon, situated in a world of reptilian monsters (a world that’s a translation from our everyday world of restaurant dining); as a bonus, in an inset, the cartoonist’s thumbnail sketch of himself

On his Instagram page, ER says he’s re-posted this old cartoon of his because of the new Godzilla movie.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Analogical extension as a joke form

December 8, 2023

Now for a joke type that isn’t pun-based. Instead, like snowclones, these jokes are based on formulaic expressions, and involve replacing items in the formulas by (semantically) analogous items; they are analogical extensions of the formulas. One popped up in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) To understand this cartoon, you have to retrieve the conventionalized N + N compound dog whistle, the basis for dog tuba (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

From NOAD:

(compound) noun dog whistle: [a] a high-pitched whistle used to train dogs, typically having a sound inaudible to humans. [b] [usually as modifier] a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group: dog-whistle issues such as immigration and crime.

It’s sense a that’s relevant to #1, which shows a guy playing a tuba at a high pitch humans can’t hear (note that the other guy is struggling to hear anything at all) but dogs can (note the dog stopping up its ears in pain). So: the dog is experiencing not a dog whistle, but (preposterously) a dog tuba.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Sense-shifting pun jokes

December 2, 2023

A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)

I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Illusions, Jokes, Language and race, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Performance, Puns, Quotations, Snowclones, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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