rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 
for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291
But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):
(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)
I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.
The comedy sketch. From the (very detailed) Wikipedia entry:
“Who’s on First?” is a comedy routine made famous by American comedy duo Abbott and Costello. The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello. However, the players’ names can simultaneously serve as the basis for questions (e.g., “Who is the first baseman?”) and responses (e.g., “The first baseman’s name is Who.”), leading to reciprocal misunderstanding and growing frustration between the performers. Although it is commonly known as “Who’s on First?”, Abbott and Costello frequently referred to it simply as “Baseball”.
with information on the predecessors of the A&C routine and its history.
Previously on this blog. Three highlights of WoF? in my postings.
— from my 10/20/14 posting “Abbott and Costello’s band”, about the Pearls Before Swine of 10/19/14:
(#2) The 2014 PearlsRat and Goat reproduce a famous Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First”, which has baseball players named Who (on first), What (on second), and I Don’t Know (on third). Another version in my posting “Chinese Abbott and Costello” of 3/18/11, with a play on the Chinese names Hu and Xi (the government figures Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping), and then a real-life basball player named Hu (the Taiwanese infielder Hu Chin-Lung, playing in Major League Baseball as Chin-Lung Hu) appears in the posting “Hu on base” of 3/30/14, with a video of the A&C routine. Now: bands (The Who, with drummer Keith Moon and guitarist Pete Townshend) and musicians (Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones; Bob Weir, guitarist for The Grateful Dead; Steve Howe, guitarist for the band Yes; and Steve Winwood, guitarist for the band Traffic). An elaborate riff on the A&C original.
(That’s the cartoonist Stephan Pastis in the last panel, about to be punished for his puns by Rat.)
— from my 3/18/16 posting “Periodic table “Who’s on First?””:
Passed on by Garson O’Toole on ADS-L, a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon from 8/26/11, with a (long and complex) version of Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First?” comedy routine that uses the abbreviations for the names of chemical elements in the periodic table (K potassium, Na sodium, No nobelium, etc.): K understood as affirmative ‘kay ‘OK’, Na as negative nah, No as negative no, etc.
— in my 9/21/18 posting “A transatlantic exercise in cartoon undertanding”, a baseball-field cartoon captioned “WHO’S ON FIRST” with Dr. Who’s Tardis on first base