Archive for the ‘Parody’ Category

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Grammarian Magazine

August 18, 2018

A 2012 playful creation of self-styled “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, reposted back on the 8th on the Our Bastard Language Facebook page:

(#1)

Yes, of course, it’s garmmra, not grammar, not about the grammar of English at all, but mostly about word choice, and then a lot of spelling and punctuation. (On garmmra, see my 2/22/12 posting “It’s All Grammar” and its successors.) Things like  the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language  and named frameworks of formal grammar(Transformational-Generative Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Gramar, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, etc.) live in another world entirely.

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Posted in Books, Grammar, Parody, Usage advice | Leave a Comment »

Photobombing Magritte

July 1, 2018

Today’s Bizarro, which requires that you recognize a painting and know the word photobomb:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

From the point of view of the peach and the orange, the image on the screen (Magritte’s painting “Son of Man”) is a photobombing of a portrait of a conventionally dressed bowler-hatted man (Magritte himself, it seems). A green apple appears unexpectedly in the portrait, in this case, interfering with and obscuring the portrait’s central image. In photobombing, the unexpected element may appear in the field of view unintentionally — irrelevant but noticeable things just happen to be caught in the scene — but it can be intentional — the unexpected element has been deliberately inserted into the scene by someone, as a prank. Only rarely does the unexpected element obscure the central image in the scene.

So from the point of view of the fruit, Magritte’s image is doubly awesome: it’s intentional (the work of a prankster, but who? why not the apple itself, acting on its own!); and it conceals the identity of the portrait’s subject (as in other bowler-hat paintings by the artist), thus subverting the idea of portraiture itself, while making a piece of fruit the actual focus of the work. Fruut Rulz.

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Posted in Argument structure, Art, Linguistics in the comics, Parody, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Midsummer cartoons

June 25, 2018

Saturday night was Midsummer’s Eve (St. John’s Eve), yesterday Midsummer Day (St. John’s Day) — so that last night was Midsummer Night, when the fairies frolic. (As they did indeed, at SF Pride events.) Meanwhile there are cartoons: a Bill Whitehead Free Range cartoon from 9/6/17, in the July 2018 issue of Funny Times; a John Atkinson Wrong Hands cartoon that came to me from Eleanor Houck; and a Scott and Borgman Zits cartoon in today’s King Features feed.

First come the cartoons, then come the holidays. (Apologies to Brecht and his Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral — pleasure first, then the serious stuff.)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics, Male art, Mammoths, Parody, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Another moment between Parody and Pastiche with Raymond Zippandler

June 12, 2018

Today’s Zippy takes us again to a hard-boiled noir-tinged land of allusion:

(#1)

Very much, as the title says, the wrong goodbye; none of the Raymond Chandler allusions are to The Long Goodbye — mostly from “Red Wind” and The Big Sleep.

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Posted in Books, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »

I love Moscow with chocolate syrup on top

June 8, 2018

Today’s politically pointed parodic Zippy:

(#1)

You might not have recognized the Bosco jingle from the 1950’s, so Bill Griffith has helpfully added a jar of the stuff to the strip.

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Posted in Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody | 1 Comment »

The things that a Dingburger needs

May 29, 2018

Today’s Zippy, with banjo burlesque:

(#1)

Meat loaf with Cool Whip, ear plugs with clam dip, …

We’ve been there before. Back in 2012, it was Mr. The Toad on the piano:

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

Crude japery

May 24, 2018

(If the image and text in #1 make you uneasy, pass on to something else. Otherwise there’s only coarse humor here, of the sort that delights middle-schoolers.)

From Aric Olnes on Facebook yesterday, this bit of crude foolishness, to which Aric added the title “Get Lei’d!”:


(#1) Marilyn Monroe + oink (of a pig) = Marilyn Monroink (the hula-dancing pig)

Dancing on what appears to be a slab of Spam (the canned meat product made mostly from ham), from a roll of the stuff. Spam from pig meat, boned and processed.

Providing an opening for coarse sexual word play on bone and roll (in a context where sexual pig and pork lurk).

Of course, I wondered where the image and text came from, who composed them. Searching took me to a larger and much more complex page of crude japery (an ad for “Dickman’s Boned Rolled Pig: Institutional Meat Food”, from Dickman Rendering & Creaming Inc.), on Reddit, where it came from Imgur (without attribution, of course). I then found some of the components of the joke ad, and eventually the identity of its creator, the cheerfully crude graphic artist Cris Shapan.

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Posted in Humor, Language of sex, Metaphor, Parody, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

POP POP

April 24, 2018

Yesterday’s Zippy had a nutjob in a diner ranting:

Are you trying to lure me into a lexicographical, self-contradicting black hole of word play so heinous it defies logic?

And today, embedded within a thick matrix of allusions pointing in many directions:

a lexicographical, self-contradicting vortex so heinous, it defies Robert Mueller

(#1)

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Posted in Idioms, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Pop culture, Quotations, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

Zombie animations in development

April 14, 2018

In today’s Zippy: zombies defy their declining pop culture fortunes by commandeering Frank Sinatra and partnering with Betty Boop and Gyro Gearloose:

(#1)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody | Leave a Comment »

Deviant Last Suppers

March 28, 2018

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, commemorating the Last Supper (of Jesus and his apostles) in Christian tradition, most famously represented in a late 15th century mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci — a painting often parodied, in playful, pointed, and deliberately sacrilegious ways. Including many turning on gender and sexuality. For instance, this 2017 Italian gay male version:

(#1) The Salerno outrage

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Parody | 3 Comments »

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