Archive for the ‘Understanding comics’ Category
September 4, 2024
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 2, 2024
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)
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Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2024
An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?
I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.
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Posted in Books, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 31, 2024
A particularly elaborate example, which came to me yesterday on the Americana Music Society site on Facebook — on this site because it’s all about Johnny Cash. The story begins:
Few people know that before he was famous, the late Johnny Cash tried a chip full of salsa served backstage in Possumneck, Mississippi that changed his life. It was spicy and tangy and smoky and so good that he just couldn’t get it off of his mind. Unfortunately, there was no jar, no label.
Now, there have been rumors that Johnny had kind of an addictive personality. He would sometimes disappear for days on end. People attributed it to drugs or alcohol. The truth is that he would roam the country searching for the special hot sauce of his dreams. He heard rumors and whispers of the deadly condiment and followed them to countless dead ends. He stopped at every Tex Mex restaurant, truck stop, and Mexican grocery in the South without finding what he sought.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 19, 2024
Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Idioms, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns, Trade names, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
June 28, 2024
Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:
(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pútǝn/ for model puttin’ /pÚtǝn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.
It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:
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Posted in Idioms, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2024
To begin the new week, a bilingual rock-music groaner in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
To understand this cartoon, you have to know the Spanish gratitude formula muchas gracias ‘many thanks’, and you have to know that Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist of the rock group The Grateful Dead; otherwise, the cartoon is just baffling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Garcias (the plural of the name Garcia) is a pun on gracias ‘thanks’ in muchas gracias — but it works better as orthographic play (just AR for RA, a reversal) than as phonological play, since Garcias and gracias are strikingly different in their prosody (second-syllable accent in Garcias, first-syllable accent in gracias); and if Garcias is pronounced in English and gracias in Spanish, they’re also segmentally distinct, notably in the final syllable, [ǝz] in English, [as] in Spanish, and in the phonetics of the r.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2024
Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
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 »
