Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).
Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.
Piccolo’s bull. The cartoon:
(#1) You will recognize the bull — an unusually urbane and digitally savvy bovine, but clearly a bull — and he’s in a curio shop, or maybe, yes, a china shop
What do bulls do in china shops? They crash around, breaking stuff, because bulls are — the stereotype goes — huge, hyperactive, and irascible. But this bull is a sweetie, calm and rational. No risk to the breakables in the china shop.
On the other hand, the digital bull crashes the shop’s website. It’s a 21st-century bull running amok in a 21st-century china shop.
Rubin’s cow. The cartoon:
(#2) Mother Goose finds a theme for one of her apparently nonsensical nursery rhymes
From my 12/20/15 posting “Four from Leigh Rubin”, on this cartoon:
A fanciful origin story about the Mother Goose rhyme “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon”, exploiting the ambiguity of moon: the satellite of the earth or (slang) ‘the exposure of the bare buttocks to somene to insult or amuse them’.