Two Bizarro cartoons from 2021, touching on questions of sexual orientation:
(#1) A Piraro Bizarro from 11/7/21: imperfect pun on sexual (orientation): sectional, as in sectional furniture ‘furniture made in sections’ — combined with a (perfect) pun on orientation ‘the relative physical position or direction of something’ (NOAD) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, wow, 12 in this strip — see this Page.)
#1 raises the question of how labile sexual orientation might be: easily changed, like the arrangement of furniture in a room, just a matter of style, fashion, or whim; or more enduring and resistant to change.
(#2) A Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 12/2/21: a complex (but perfect) pun, turning primarily on turn on ‘start, cause to operate’ vs. ‘arouse (sexually)’, but secondarily involving connection in both electrical and emotional senses (Dan Piraro says there are 5 of his symbols in this strip)
#2 is also a joke about visual pornography: the artwork depicts a 9v female connector, so it appeals to the 9v battery, but not to an AA battery, which needs a different sort of connective hardware.
Then there are the brand names: Enervator, a play on the brand name Energizer; and Zap, possibly a play on the Energizer MAX family of alkaline batteries, more likely just the vivid verb zap used for lightning strikes and the like.
Finally, #2 evokes two senses of hard-wired: in computers, ‘permanent, inalterable’; in behavior, ‘inborn, instinctive’. (The connecting idea is that what’s built-in can’t be changed.)
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