By Benjamin Schwartz in the 12/11/23 print issue of the New Yorker:
On first looking at the cartoon, we go to the faces, because faces are so socially important to human beings. There are two: a woman, speaking; and her male companion, the driver of the car they are in, his face turned to listen to her. She is voicing an observation (usually a complaint) that is conventionally and stereotypically taken be to common in intimate couples in our society, that the addressee is turning into — becoming, in significant ways — one of their own parents.
In any case, what we perceive at first is the passenger telling the driver: You’re turning into your mother, with inchoative turn into ‘become’.
But then we take in the rest of the drawing, where we see — surprise! — an old woman, up against the hood of the car, her hands up in the air, her cane flying into the air; the car has run into her. The passenger is in fact observing to the driver that he’s driving into the old woman, using one of the senses of motional turn into, with a complement referring to the end-point of the turn.
In somewhat more detail, starting with motional turn: ‘move in a circular direction wholly or partly around an axis or point’ (NOAD), either intransitive (The car turned into a wall) or transitive (He turned the car into a wall). A third motional usage (distinct from the ordinary intransitive), in He turned into a wall, might be object-less turn understood transitively, as ‘he motionally-turned (something, like a vehicle) into a wall’; or it might be intransitive motional turn with its subject he taken metonymically, as referring to something, like a vehicle, that is under the subject’s referent’s control (that is, under his control) — but, either way, it’s another sense of motional turn, and it’s the sense that’s presented visually in the cartoon: the car is shown driving into an elderly woman that we take to be the driver’s mother. He’s motionally-turning into his mother, rather that inchoatively-turning into her.
The artistry in the cartoon as a pun joke comes from its depending on our processing the cartoon visually in two stages, with one perception of the scene (in which the passenger is pointedly noting that the driver’s presentation of himself is becoming like his mother’s) followed by a totally different one (in which the passenger is warning the driver that he’s running his mother down). A shifting of sense takes place, and it takes place over time, but in our processing of the joke image rather than in the telling of the joke (as in my 12/2/23 posting “Sense-shifting pun jokes”).
(Note: There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on Benjamin Schwartz cartoons.)