It’s December, and as the Christmas elves appear, there comes a startling elfshelfism joke (in abbreviated form), on Facebook today. I got it from Ryan Tamares, who got it from Britannic Xen Osiris Zane, who got it from someone else, and who knows where such memic material originated.
(#1) Yes, Spock on a cock: the science officer of the starship USS Enterprise, riding a monstrously large rooster (across a bleak alien landscape)
To get to the punchline Spock on a cock, you have to recognize the figure of Spock (from popular-culture tv and movie fiction) and also recall that cock — most commonly used for raunchy reference to the penis — is also a somewhat antique or specialist word for a rooster. (As a result, #1 is not only a joke, but also a slightly dirty joke.)
As described in my 12/22/22 posting “Elfshelfisms”, the elfshelfism is a riddle form presented visually, and depends on rhyme (perfect rhyme or half-rhyme), with example punchlines: lemur on a femur, Dolly [Parton] on a tamale, and sonorants on cormorants.
From that posting:
An elfshelfism is a riddle form with three components:
— an essentially fixed setup:
You’ve heard of elf on the shelf, now get ready for …
(with minor variations allowed)
— a riddle picture, a drawing or photo
— the punchline, of the form
N1 on a N2 (where the nouns N1 and N2 rhyme), as in the model elf on a shelf
(again, with minor variarions allowed)
Your task, as riddle-solver, is to find two elements in the riddle picture such that one element can be said to be on the other and the two elements have rhyming names (N1 and N2) in English, with the result that the picture can be described as N1 on a N2. Punchline!
… A vast numbers of pairs of rhyming nouns can be turned into elfshelfisms. Some of the results are routine and unsurprising — duck on a truck, boy on a toy, dog on a log — while others provide the pleasure of surprising juxtaposition — Santa on a Fanta, yeti on spaghetti, sloth on a Goth, Lego on an Eggo. A huge number require that you recognize some depicted personage on sight: [the singer] Drake on a cake [or]
Gollum on a column, Snape on a grape, Mr. Bean on the Queen, Bernie [Sanders] on a gurney, Snoop [Dogg] on the stoop, Rocky [the boxer] on a jockey
The rhyming words in #1’s punchline are not at all pedestrian, and N1 is the name of someone notable, so #1 is indeed pleasantly surprising.