Archive for the ‘Parody’ Category
October 27, 2022
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, yet another in their long line of Psychiatrist cartoons (today with Dr. Sigmund Freud as the therapist and Baron Victor Frankenstein as the patient) — a conventional form that, in the hands of an ingenious cartoonist, can be used as the vehicle for almost any joke:
(#1) The Baron makes a Freudian slip; Wayno’s title: “Unexpected Insight” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Doctor Doctor, this is no whim
I got a bad case of having created him
No pill’s gonna cure my ill
I got a bad case of having created him
Freudian slip, Frankensteinian slip: master, monster.
Yes, yes, a pile of bits and pieces jumbled together here (and full appreciation of the cartoon calls for lots of further background knowledge), so there’s plenty to talk about — and was, even before I introduced Robert Palmer into the mix. So grab your torches and pitchforks and let’s advance on this assemblage of oddly fitting parts.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Parody, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2022
(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above — so some readers may want to skip over it)
Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):
(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’
German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Double entendres, German, Language and food, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy, Parodies, Parody, Phallicity, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
July 11, 2022
Appearing in my FB as a response to my 7/4 posting (for Fathers Day) “I am a good Boy for you, Daddy” (about Daddy – Boy relationships), this remarkable billboard (without identification or comment), featuring a pig-cop character — Mister Piggie — getting oral with an inert character Boy :
(#1) Pig Kisses Boy! Pig because he’s a cop? Pig because he’s unable to control his sexual impulses? (or, of course, both); I suppose that’s supposed to be life-saving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but still: ick
The text looks like a book title (or maybe a quotation from a book), attributed to some Bobby Peters we’re expected to recognize. Is the billboard advertising a book by football player and game analyst Bobby Peters? About whom I had trouble getting much information, but then that’s an alien world to me. I spent maybe half an hour fruitlessly trying to chase Bobby Peters down, and then a search on “some call him pig” turned up a Boing Boing posting “Some call him pig!” by Rob Beschizza from 3/3/22. To start with, the football Bobby Peters has nothing to do with it; it’s about a Columbus GA mayor named Bobby Peters. And there’s a 50-year history of “Some call him Pig!”.
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Posted in Address terms, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Memes, Music, Parody, Signage, Slogans, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
July 3, 2022
(Warning: lots of off-color word play about male masturbation)
To celebrate American independence (year 246), the Fort Troff company (“Ruff Stuff for Pig Sluts”), purveyor of sex accessories, primarily to guys like me), offers this (parodic) slogan:
Yankee Doodle keep it up / Yank your doodle dandy
The verb yank ‘masturbate’ is only accidentally homophonous with the yank– of Yankee, but according to GDoS, the noun doodle ‘penis, esp. a child’s penis’ is attested from the 18th century on.
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Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Parody, Poetic form, Poetry, Slang | Leave a Comment »
June 18, 2022
(This is obviously going to go where no kids or sexually modest people should go, and it’s going to get there fast.)
The commercial names Doggie Diner and Mr. Whippy, both surely conceived in all innocence, but, to the prepared mind, easily evoking sexual images (as it happens, my mind is prepared for man-on-man sexual images, so that’s where I’m inclined to go): the doggie / doggy position for anal intercourse; and a leatherman master whipping a leatherman slave.
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Posted in Double entendres, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
June 11, 2022
The plants, the music, the clothing! There are three parts to this posting. Part 1 is about plants, specifically a Hydrangea macrophylla now blooming on my patio for the first time since 2017. Part 2 (which ends up with Randy Rainbow doing a fabulous barbershop quartet performance — just the music, ma’m) and Part 3 (which ends up with the superhot Argentine fashion model Maximiliano Patane posing shirtless) are tied to Part 1 by the color dusty rose or dusky rose (a type of pink), some mental association, and some sheer accident. The color, from the Color Codes site:
(#1) In actual practice, the color label covers a range of hues, some lighter, some brighter, some pinker
From dusty rose by association to the song “Lida Rose” and to Randy Rainbow’s performance of it. Also from dusty rose in a search for men’s clothing in the color (after a search for clothing in this color got tons of women’s clothing, mostly lingerie and wedding dresses, and nothing for men; the color is clearly highly gendered), by happy accident to a photo of an extremely steamy and wildly hirsute Patane modeling a suit in that color. Which led me to the model more generally; my ignorance of the world of high fashion is both wide and deep, but for Patane a 2016 spread on him (“hotter than California weather”) in Out magazine provided shirtless delight.
And then I was able to tie all three parts together in a brief parody of “Lida Rose”, in which the singer speaks to his lover Max using the pet name Dusky Rose for him.
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Posted in Clothing, Color, Fashion, Language and plants, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Shirtlessness | 8 Comments »
April 3, 2022
(There will, as the title tells you, be riffs on squat, well, on squat. Since I’m given to finding my material in louche and faggy places, there will be brief encounters with squat — short and thick, fireplug-like — male organs and with a squatting position for receptive anal intercourse. But no visible body parts.)
I glanced at today’s incoming e-mail, which included a mailing from the New York Times with a link to a story of theirs offering life advice:
(#1)
I found it remarkable that the paper was giving pointers on how to embark on living in uninhabited buildings without the legal right to do so. But then we live in precarious times, and millions are having trouble coping.
Then I found the fine print of the mail header:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Music, Names, Parody, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
February 13, 2022
In the Zippy strip for Superb Owl Day, Sunday 2/13 this year, another burlesque from that treasury of the absurd, The Songs of the Toad:
(#1) “Buy Me a Balloon”, a tangled version of “Fly Me to the Moon” — which, as it happens, has been zombielesqued on Zippy, in 2018, as “Flay Me to th’ Moon”
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Parody | 1 Comment »
November 30, 2021
… “Pull my tail, and see my eye light up!” Mr. Nutz is a squirrel of brass, also a notorious flasher (if you don’t pull his tail, he’ll do it himself, in the road) — all at once a squirrel, a brass sculpture, a flasher, and a flashlight too (alas, though he tries to be all things to all people, he is neither a floor wax nor a dessert topping). The eye in his brass face lights up lewdly to show us the way to squirrel verse #2:
We’ll walk in the light, beautiful light,
Come where the dew-drops of morning are bright;
Shine all around us by day and by night,
Squirrels, the light of the world.
(Truly, no squirrel’s light was ever hidden under a basket. Mr. Nutz is not only brazen and bawdy, but also bold and boastful. And, he truly believes, beautiful.)
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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Parody, Poetry, Pranks, Riddles | 3 Comments »
