Today’s Bizarro offer some transposition (spooneristic) word play, involving the exchange of the initial syllables of the two accented words in the clichéd expression pipe and slippers — giving the eminently depictable slip and pipers:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 9 in this strip — see this Page.)
In the 2/15&22/21 issue of the New Yorker, this cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt:
(#1)
“Now that we can talk, we have to have meetings.”
In the larger domain of Emergence of Language cartoons, this is a subspecialty — on the Now What? theme:
We’re learned to speak / talk / write. We’ve invented language. Now what?
In the New Yorker issue of 2/15&22/21, the winning caption to a drawing by Joe Dator:
(#1) ‘Twas commissions tamed the bull
Well, yes, the cartoon has the bull talking and taking orders and handling money and all that, but this is CartoonWorld, where animals routinely do such things. What’s remarkable is that the bull has given up a core aspect of his bull nature: aggressiveness (an especially troublesome characteristic in a creature of such size).
(This posting — with its depictions of and street-language descriptions of, sex between men — is totally unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
An ad, both very carefully and pleasingly composed and also goofily absurd, for the HUNT eZine gay porn sale for Valentine’s Day 2021, plays on movie clichés of tango or flamenco dancing, in which a red rose (symbolizing sexual passion) is held between the teeth of one of the dancers in a couple, most commonly the woman, but sometimes the man. (Note: roses, of whatever color, between the teeth play no role whatsoever in actual tango and flamenco.)
The ad shows two men who are fucking, not dancing, but the top (exhibiting a fiercely ecstatic facial expression) has a red rose clenched between his teeth, as a symbol of his overwhelming desire for the bottom (whose eyes are closed and whose mouth is half open, in receptive ecstasy):
Chacun à son goût on Valentine’s Day. Here’s cartoonist Lars Kenseth’s take on sentimental gift-giving among the baleen whales (from the 2/15&22/21 issue of the New Yorker):
A swarm of krill! How did you know?”
Today’s Zippy has Zippy and Claude strolling in a fantasy city not unlike San Francisco (note the analogue of the Transamerica Tower) and remarking on an advertising display, a shark fin extolling “Joe’s seafood shack [or possibly Joe’s Seafood Shack] on the waterfront”, a fantasy eating establishment:
(#1)
Now, Zippy strips are often about/in specific diners (and motels and fast food restaurants and casual dining places and bowling alleys etc.), places that (with some work) can be tracked down (from their names and/or locations) and depicted (there’s a Page on this blog on my postings about these strips.
But #1 is different. Pretty clearly, it’s not about some actual seafood shack (or Seafood Shack) that advertises with a shark fin, but spins a little fantasy on such eating places as a type.
However, it might still be a (suggestive) allusion to one such specifc place, especially if there’s (just) one that’s well-known over a wide area. An allusion doesn’t have to be exact in detail; close will do.
The Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/25/18, yet another instance of the cartoon meme of Ahab and the whale, this time showing only the whale — but the whale in communication with Ahab via their smartphones:
(See the Page on this blog on comic conventions, including the cartoon meme of Ahab and the whale.)
Yesterday’s (2/8) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a pun on autocrat: octocrat, itself a portmanteau of octopus and autocrat:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
To come: notes on the words involved; some facts about octopuses that make them symbolically powerful; the octopus in political cartoons; and Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Eight Arms to Oppress You”, with its allusion to the Ring verse from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
(The true title is, of course “Putting the fuck into Fuck VDay”; I’ve replaced occurrences of fuck by obscenicons for citation purposes. But the posting is indeed heavily (though not entirely) about men fucking men, so it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The story began yesterday (2/7), with mailings for four different sites, all with the Fuck Vday Sale ad image:
(#1)
Twink Top (role reversal, with twinks as tops), Fun Size Boys (“featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys”), Growl Boys (“anthropomorphic gay furry fantasy stories of werewolves and mythological creatures”), Gaycest (dad/son sex), Boy For Sale (slave boys).
(The Twink Top and Fun Size Boys sites are treated in my 8/10/20 posting “The pleasures of role reversal”.)
More on these sites below, except to note that they are very much about fucking (and that turns out to be relevant).
The question is how Fuck Vday is to be understood in the ad slogan. Is it an instance of what I’ve called the expletive predicate fuck (James D. McCawley’s quasi-verb fuck), which has no sexual content? In my 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, I note that expletive predicate fuck is one of the
idiomatic uses of specific expletives to curse, deprecate, or dismiss things, as in:
Fuck this proposal! To/The hell with them! Shit on the whole business!
Expletive predicate fuck occurs commonly in the dismissive Fuck VDay! and Fuck Valentine’s Day! (disavowing any interest in celebrating the holiday) — examples below.
Or is the ad slogan Fuck Vday to be understood as announcing Valentine’s Day as a celebration of fucking — in which case the slogan would seem to be a compound noun with Vday as head and Fuck as a noun (denoting a fuck or fucks) or a verb (denoting fucking), so that the interpretation would be either ‘Valentine’s Day for a fuck or fucks’ or ‘Valentine’s Day for people to fuck on’ (the distinction is subtle), parallel to something like Fuck Weekend (The members of Sigma Epsilon Xi always looked forward to Fuck Weekend).
Since the ad slogan appears to be both intensely sexual — it’s all about the fucking — and celebratory (rather than dismissive or deprecatory), I incline to the compound noun interpretation.
Carnal Media. The four sites listed above in connection with #1 are all Carnal Media sites (the company has a number of niche gay porn websites,all run as subscription services that offer an inventory of videos the subscriber can view), including also Scout Boys, Raw Fuck Boys, Jason Sparks Live, Dirty Boy Society, and Jock Pussy.
Similarly, from my 9/20/20 posting “The penis-anus nexus”:
Say Uncle is a subsite in the Lucas family of gay porn sites. It embraces a number of “premium” series, mostly involving men in relationships of unequal power [also many taboo-breaking relationships]:
Family Dick (in step families); Missionary Boys; Brother Crush (step brothers); Yes Father (church leaders); Latin Leche (Latin boys doing g4p); Young Perps (loss prevention officers and male shoplifters); Black Godz (powerful gay black men and their male subs); Dad Creep (stepdad/stepson); Stay Home Bro (bros quarantined together)
And in my 1/27/19 posting “Two specialist porn companies”, what appears to be an independent operation, Peter Fever: “featuring quality videos of muscular Asian men jocks and twinks”. (The other specialist company in that posting is Growl Boys.)
All of these sites are focused on fucking, with a variety of emotional tones. Something of a surprise, from the Jason Sparks Live site at Carnal Media, is this still showing JJ Knight & Jack Hunter from the video BAREBACK in Birmingham:
(#2)
The two men smile a lot; in this photo, they’re two nice guys, sporting welcoming half-smiles, who happen to be fucking, bareback, in the woods on a beautiful day (the Loving Buddies facial expression); as they get into fucking, their facial expressions go into Man at Work, aka Workman / Craftsman — see the Page on this blog on facial expressions in mansex.
Fuck Valentine’s Day!, with the expletive predicate fuck. So much for the sex. Now to the Strong Language (A Sweary Blog About Swearing) site, “Fuck Valentine’s Day!” by Nancy Friedman on 2/5/15:
Hearts, flowers, chocolate, candlelight, blah, blah, whatever. For some of us, February 14 is just a date on the calendar with the name of some obscure saint inexplicably attached to it, and “St. Valentine’s Day” is properly followed by only one word: “massacre.” Good news, though — thanks to the increasingly robust Fuck Valentine’s Day movement, we can spend our money just as recklessly as the roses-and-diamonds crowd. Fuck, yeah!
— with an entertaining collection of graphic resources, among them:
(#3) An apostrophe-free tank top from Skreened, $17.99
(#4) The classic “Keep Calm” poster “Available as a poster, mug, mouse mat, decal, and much more at The Keep Calm-o-Matic.”
It came to me first through Jeff Bowles on Facebook today: this Mark Stivers cartoon, presenting a small exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1)
Two contributions to the cartoon: a dramatic principle; and the Star Trek tv shows and movies.
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