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Ode to Almond Joy
Today’s Zippy, with a candy-bar parody of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (An der Freude), used by Beethoven in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony: (#1) Almond Joy, Mounds, Mars bars! Sometimes you feel...
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Return of the word avalanche
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine, with a word avalanche: As before in Pearls, the strip goes meta when the cartoonist is taken to task for his word play. Earlier word avalanches in this strip: on...
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Inflamed tendon
My latest affliction is tennis elbow, inflammation of a tendon on the outside of an elbow, usually set off by repeated use of the joint (as in playing tennis, working as a carpenter, or the like), but...
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Bromancing the Bone
My current favorite gay porn title of the outrageous pun variety: Romancing the Stone > Bromancing the Bone. We start with the portmanteau noun bromance. From Wikipedia: A bromance is a close,...
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The Spirit of Geometry
In today’s Zippy, Magritte goes on and on: (#1) Here, the Magritte The Spirit of Geometry is cartoonized, like the paintings in this posting of March 10th: (#2) Two things: about the Magritte; and...
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Today’s artistic pun
Today’s Rhymes With Orange: (#1) The Thinker meets the Tinkertoy. Rodin’s The Thinker, shown in roughly the same view as the Tinkertoy version: (#2) On the toy, from Wikipedia: The Tinkertoy...
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Keister Island
In the 3/16 New Yorker, this cartoon by Jack Ziegler: (#1) Giant buttocks instead of giant heads. And the outrageous pun keister on the rhyming Easter. This is not the only exploitation of the...
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Signifying
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse (on-line here): They’re playing a game of the Dozens, which starts out promisingly in the first panel but then runs down and takes a strange turn. From Wikipedia: The...
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Elise Partridge
The story starts with this poem about X in the April 2nd issue of the New York Review of Books: X, a C.V. I stand, legs astride, a colossus— or dancer in fifth position, wide port de bras. Polymorph...
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Name those spiders
Making the rounds in science reporting recently: newly discovered peacock spiders. From National Geographic on the 24th. the story “Behold Sparklemuffin and Skeletorus, New Peacock Spiders: A few new...
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John Bell
From Facebook friends, this John Bell cartoon: (#1) A wonderful double pun, on stroke (‘brushstroke’ or ‘cerebrovascular accident’) and brush (‘implement for painting etc.’ or ‘light and fleeting...
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More na na na
An addition to my “na na na” posting, with an xkcd cartoon compressing a collection of “na” songs into a chart: the song “Get a Job” and the name Sha Na Na for the rock group that took its name from...
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The element of confusion
A graphic that appeared on Facebook yesterday: (#1) Versions of this are available as t-shirts from a wide assortment of suppliers, with various atomic numbers on them. This one has 29, the atomic...
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Allusion in The Economist
Every so often I post here on how some publications (science publications, especially, but plenty of others as well) indulge in various kinds of language play in titles, captions, lead sentences, etc....
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Sunday Pun
Today’s Bizarro, with an outrageous play on The Mummy’s Curse (the movie): (#1) Four ingredients in this bit of language play: the sarcophagus and its association with mummies; Silicon Valley and its...
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Drag mashups
In the March-April 2015 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, the piece “Ryan Landry of the ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ School”, in which Jim Farley interviews Landry. From Farley’s intro: A comic playwright and...
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Jim Dultz
A cartoonist, with this cartoon in the May issue of Funny Times: (#1) This works pretty well as a pun in print — Oedipus Rex / Oedipus Rx — with the mother theme and the prescription theme combined....
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Verbatim letter
A while back, in a comment on my word entertainment posting, I referred to a note I posted in Verbatim magazine — a letter in #1.4.6 (1975) — with (among other things) observations on –oon words in...
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A playful poetic footnote
In my “More detection” posting, we came across writer E. C. Bentley, with fame in two areas. From Wikipedia: E. C. Bentley (full name Edmund Clerihew Bentley; 10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a...
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Elsa Lanchester
In idle chat with Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky at breakfast on Saturday, Elsa Lanchester’s album Bawdy Cockney Songs came up, including the double entendre in “Linda and her Londonderry Air”. My...
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