A memorable New Yorker cover for the New Year: an Owen Smith parody of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (one of a great many such parodies):
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Three things: Nighthawks parodies, Owen Smith, and party hats.
Archive for the ‘Parody’ Category
Nighthawks on New Year’s
January 2, 2019Nighthawks in search of an artist
December 29, 2018Passed on on Facebook, this Bill Whitehead cartoon, with some broad art humor:
Before Edward Hopper discovered the sad diner and immortalized it in Nighthawks.
Beat Noel
December 25, 2018Today’s Zippy, “Merry Whatever”, set in the Beatnik District of Dingburg, supplies (in the second panel) a burlesque of a beloved Christmas carol:
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So you can line up the burlesque with the model:
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
For the season: from fish to moose, penguin intervention
December 22, 2018First, season’s greetings from the person responsible for “Hippo Birdie Two Ewe(s)!”. Then, a duplicitous stop-motion animation penguin bearing gifts.
Revisiting 22: now with berries and cherries
November 19, 2018My 10/9/18 posting “Fruit bars” featured my mother-in-law Monique’s recipe for apricot bars / squares/ crisp cookies. Dried apricots made into a chewy filling for cookies with crunchy top and bottom layers, cut into squares.
At the time, Kim Darnell (who’s done all the actual work in this enterprise) and I contemplated other dried fruits as a basis: figs, dates, prunes, mangos, etc. We have so far achieved: apricots, figs, and dried cherries and mixed berries, the last baked yesterday.
I’ve been moved to verse, of a sort, but nothing original — instead, a parody of a bit of Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense verse “The Hunting of the Snark” (published in 1876, with grotesque illustrations by Henry Holiday: full text available here).
Grammarian Magazine
August 18, 2018A 2012 playful creation of self-styled “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, reposted back on the 8th on the Our Bastard Language Facebook page:
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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.
Photobombing Magritte
July 1, 2018Today’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.
Midsummer cartoons
June 25, 2018Saturday 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.)
Another moment between Parody and Pastiche with Raymond Zippandler
June 12, 2018Today’s Zippy takes us again to a hard-boiled noir-tinged land of allusion:
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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.
I love Moscow with chocolate syrup on top
June 8, 2018Today’s politically pointed parodic Zippy:
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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.
