One reason they were unsuccessful is that every single “rhyme” is badly fractured. In the first three cases, it is a consonent mismatch, but the last one is even worse, failing to match the vowel.
If they’d have made it “St. Nick on Your Knickers,” that mighta had a chance.
I already copyrighted that, btw.
@ Andréa – Nuts, I was hoping for a cameo appearance from the King of Id in the last scene.
Wouldn’t that be ‘The Kid of Id’? Anyway, no, that’s Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s RatFink character.
@Kilby – Yeah the first three rhymes are kinda “meh” but I think you made the same mistake that I did with the last one. It’s Claus like “claws” not like “house” which makes it the only one that rhymes reasonably well.
I’m guessing the artist came up with the punch line first and then wrote the comic around it.
Yeah, the rhymes all suck, which kinda ruins the “joke”. Claus on Bras is actually the closest rhyme of all of them
If Santa in the bra drawer “Claus IN your bras” seems more appropriate to me, especially since bras typically do not lie flat on the bottom of a drawer… it also has a few funnier readings. Maybe the author felt that the joke would not be clear without “on.”
As for the vowel mismatch between Claus and bras, some people (principally men, as far as I can tell) pronounce ‘bras’ to rhyme with ‘Claus’.
still better than shmutz on yer putz. no, that rhyme doesn’t work either.
” some people (principally men, as far as I can tell) pronounce ‘bras’ to rhyme with ‘Claus’.”
Speaking as one of those men, what’s the alternative?
In UK land we – well, I – pronounce Claus like “claws” of a cat with the mouth forming a kind of O shape, and bras more like “brahs” or “braas” with a wider, more open mouth. But then, for me Mary, merry and marry are all pronounced differently, which I understand is often not the case in the USA. So it also depends on how you pronounce claws: klorze, in my case, not klarze (which rhymes with brarze). But then enlightenment there depends on how you pronounce klorze. Rhotic stuff too, probably.
That’s what I was wondering: does Coverly pronounce Claus” weirdly, or “bras.”
If anything, I’d say “Claus in your drawers” flows marginally better.
I still think “Claus” and “bras” is a perfectly good rhyme.
Yes, to me Claus in your Drawers rhymes a lot better than Claus in your Bras.
Narmitaj, the USA has regional accents just like Britain. My personal dialect does not combine those vowels, but some others do.
Bizarre. Claws in your Braws seems a perfectly fine rhyme but Claws in your Droors (rhymes with doors) is not at all.
I have “drawers” as “drawrs”, which makes it a mis-rhyme for “Claus”, because of the extraneous “r”, even though the vowel sound is the same.
“Narmitaj, the USA has regional accents just like Britain.”
I would quibble about the “just like” part — the standard deviation of American accents is like an order of magnitude less than for British accents, at least…
“Claus in your drawers” doesn’t work for me, especially in text form. I see “drawers” and want to pronounce it as “draw – ers”, even if I don’t pronounce it like that.
To my So Cal ears, Claus and bras rhyme perfectly not just with each other, but also with claws, pause, draws, straws, and paws. Drawer sounds like roar, door, whore, pour, and snore. Frosty/coffee, Blitzen/kitten, and angel/bagel are definitely not rhymes to me.
I think they are intentionally bad rhymes. That’s the joke.
I actually like Blitzen on a kitten. It’s not a true rhyme that the accent, vowels and “bite” (whatever the linguistic term for the hardness of the consonants is) are good enough and the image is silly. Angel on a bagel is just awful.
In Western Pennsylvania, at least, merging the vowels of ‘Claus’ and ‘bras’ is standard, and in general I couldn’t tell you which of the two a non-merger uses in any given word, I believe the vowel I use in both is that of non-mergers’ ‘Claus’. I do use the ‘bra’ vowel in some words of recent foreign origin.
@James Pollock – “I have “drawers” as “drawrs”, which makes it a mis-rhyme for “Claus”, because of the extraneous ‘r'” That’s the rhotic thing I mentioned earlier… in England (not everywhere in the UK, though) we tend not to pronounce that second ‘r’, so drawers and draws sound pretty much identical.
“However, the historical /r/ is not pronounced except before vowels in “non-rhotic varieties”,[b] which include most of the dialects of modern England […] and some parts of the southern and eastern—particularly coastal northeastern[4]—United States.[…] In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel”.
There are plenty of poems exploring the oddities of English rhymes/ pronunciation. The ones listed here: http://spellingsociety.org/uploaded_misc/poems-online-misc-1419940069.pdf are mostly of words that look identical but sound different, though. Also, most are “printed” in columnar fashion, like a newspaper, so don’t try to read all along the line.
In the case of drawers specifically there was a BBC ban on comedians making comments such as “winter draws on” as it is a double entendre for “winter drawers on”, drawers in this case being a form of undergarment.
In 1949 the phrase “was then included in the BBC’s Green Book as unsuitable for broadcast. In fact, any mention of “Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on” was given ‘an absolute ban’, along with jokes about “Honeymoon couples”, “Fig leaves” and “Animal habits”.”
The only one of these that I actually find funny is Frosty in the 3rd panel. So that one should be the 4th panel.
“Bras” should probably be pronounced /BRAHS/ but some American accents pronounce it /BRAWS/, making it rhyme with “Claus” (which is /KLAWS/, not /KLOWCE/ like the Germanic given name “Klaus”).
Thanks, Powers.
BRAWS and BRAHS are the same to huge portion of the united states including the west coast and Illinois.
Doctor: “Say AH” and “Aw, you’re cute” sound exactly the same. “The fawning faun called Paul saw all brawl for the sought doll. Sod all.” (All be THE, and FOR have the same vowel, albeit the consonants around them make some microsopically longer or softer.
As for Draws and Drawers or may be a regional thing but the vowel in Drawers is pronounces as on O as in FOR. And the vowel in Draws is pronounced as A as in FAR (but without the R which is very definitely pronounced.)
In alt.usage.english, the canonical example of the vowel merger is “cot and caught”. Some places pronounce those identically, others (including where I live) do not.
I wonder if this is the “ghoti = fish” thing. The O in women maybe if recorded and replayed alone may be indistinguishable from the I in fish, but I don’t think any one would claim that they are “pronounced the same” even if they actually … are.
So for all this DRAWS vs DRAHS and cAUGHt vs cAhT where *sure* the surrounding letters make you open your mouth more or it’s softer or breathier… but in the end does it actually sonically make different sounds or do we just imagine they sound different. I’m not convinced there is any difference in sound.
The thing is the same people who insist DRAWS and DRAHS are UTTERly different are the same people who can’t be bothered to tell a wren from a finch. *sigh*
“Bra” is actually short for “brassiere” as in the sentence “One of the contestants at the barbecue contest was injured when he burned his hand on a hot brassiere.”
So, Powers, the fourth panel should have been “Claus on your blouse?”
I agree with Woozy (among others) – Claus and bras rhyme, to me, and drawers is utterly different. So is blouse. Braw, if I pronounce it carefully, is not a brassiere, but if I’m saying it casually I swallow the w and it sounds like brah and the undergarment. And cot and caught are two different sounds.
DARE is a lot of fun (https://www.daredictionary.com/) – I participated in a couple of their surveys, and probably threw it off in weird directions. New Jersey mother, Michigan father, and I grew up overseas with more British (one Scot, several I don’t know but England somewhere) friends than American. I generally say I have a “mid-Atlantic” accent – which means it sounds weird, in different spots, to _everyone_.
I think “Santy in your panties” would have been funnier.
“drawers is utterly different. So is blouse” but the german name Klaus rhymes with blouse. But *no-one* pronounces Santa Claus and Santa Klaus (not even Saint Nicklaus is pronounced like that).
How do you pronounce ‘Jack Nicklaus”?
“I think “Santy in your panties” would have been funnier.”
Double meaning not acceptable for American newspaper comics page. Kids read those!
Or something like that.
In most of North America I think the “Claus/Bras” rhyme works pretty well. “Claus/Drawers” probably only works in New York-influenced dialects (and possibly New Orleans).
Tom Lehrer supposedly once identified a rhyme for “orange” that also only works in some Northeastern dialects: “Eating an orange / while making love / results in bizarre enj- / oyment thereof”
I could actually see someone putting out reindeer hats for cats and calling them Blitzen on your Kitten.
Comics I Don't Understand 
One reason they were unsuccessful is that every single “rhyme” is badly fractured. In the first three cases, it is a consonent mismatch, but the last one is even worse, failing to match the vowel.
A parody of ‘Elf on a Shelf’, I assumed . . .
. . . like these:
http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=cscwy&uc_full_date=20181214
If they’d have made it “St. Nick on Your Knickers,” that mighta had a chance.
I already copyrighted that, btw.
@ Andréa – Nuts, I was hoping for a cameo appearance from the King of Id in the last scene.
Wouldn’t that be ‘The Kid of Id’? Anyway, no, that’s Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s RatFink character.
@Kilby – Yeah the first three rhymes are kinda “meh” but I think you made the same mistake that I did with the last one. It’s Claus like “claws” not like “house” which makes it the only one that rhymes reasonably well.
I’m guessing the artist came up with the punch line first and then wrote the comic around it.
Yeah, the rhymes all suck, which kinda ruins the “joke”. Claus on Bras is actually the closest rhyme of all of them
If Santa in the bra drawer “Claus IN your bras” seems more appropriate to me, especially since bras typically do not lie flat on the bottom of a drawer… it also has a few funnier readings. Maybe the author felt that the joke would not be clear without “on.”
As for the vowel mismatch between Claus and bras, some people (principally men, as far as I can tell) pronounce ‘bras’ to rhyme with ‘Claus’.
still better than shmutz on yer putz. no, that rhyme doesn’t work either.
” some people (principally men, as far as I can tell) pronounce ‘bras’ to rhyme with ‘Claus’.”
Speaking as one of those men, what’s the alternative?
In UK land we – well, I – pronounce Claus like “claws” of a cat with the mouth forming a kind of O shape, and bras more like “brahs” or “braas” with a wider, more open mouth. But then, for me Mary, merry and marry are all pronounced differently, which I understand is often not the case in the USA. So it also depends on how you pronounce claws: klorze, in my case, not klarze (which rhymes with brarze). But then enlightenment there depends on how you pronounce klorze. Rhotic stuff too, probably.
That’s what I was wondering: does Coverly pronounce Claus” weirdly, or “bras.”
If anything, I’d say “Claus in your drawers” flows marginally better.
I still think “Claus” and “bras” is a perfectly good rhyme.
Yes, to me Claus in your Drawers rhymes a lot better than Claus in your Bras.
Narmitaj, the USA has regional accents just like Britain. My personal dialect does not combine those vowels, but some others do.
Bizarre. Claws in your Braws seems a perfectly fine rhyme but Claws in your Droors (rhymes with doors) is not at all.
I have “drawers” as “drawrs”, which makes it a mis-rhyme for “Claus”, because of the extraneous “r”, even though the vowel sound is the same.
I wonder if “Elf On The Shelf” is the forgotten last verse of “Rats In My Room”. https://youtu.be/x4E4GyW2tE0
“Narmitaj, the USA has regional accents just like Britain.”
I would quibble about the “just like” part — the standard deviation of American accents is like an order of magnitude less than for British accents, at least…
“Claus in your drawers” doesn’t work for me, especially in text form. I see “drawers” and want to pronounce it as “draw – ers”, even if I don’t pronounce it like that.
To my So Cal ears, Claus and bras rhyme perfectly not just with each other, but also with claws, pause, draws, straws, and paws. Drawer sounds like roar, door, whore, pour, and snore. Frosty/coffee, Blitzen/kitten, and angel/bagel are definitely not rhymes to me.
I think they are intentionally bad rhymes. That’s the joke.
I actually like Blitzen on a kitten. It’s not a true rhyme that the accent, vowels and “bite” (whatever the linguistic term for the hardness of the consonants is) are good enough and the image is silly. Angel on a bagel is just awful.
In Western Pennsylvania, at least, merging the vowels of ‘Claus’ and ‘bras’ is standard, and in general I couldn’t tell you which of the two a non-merger uses in any given word, I believe the vowel I use in both is that of non-mergers’ ‘Claus’. I do use the ‘bra’ vowel in some words of recent foreign origin.
@James Pollock – “I have “drawers” as “drawrs”, which makes it a mis-rhyme for “Claus”, because of the extraneous ‘r'” That’s the rhotic thing I mentioned earlier… in England (not everywhere in the UK, though) we tend not to pronounce that second ‘r’, so drawers and draws sound pretty much identical.
“However, the historical /r/ is not pronounced except before vowels in “non-rhotic varieties”,[b] which include most of the dialects of modern England […] and some parts of the southern and eastern—particularly coastal northeastern[4]—United States.[…] In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel”.
There are plenty of poems exploring the oddities of English rhymes/ pronunciation. The ones listed here: http://spellingsociety.org/uploaded_misc/poems-online-misc-1419940069.pdf are mostly of words that look identical but sound different, though. Also, most are “printed” in columnar fashion, like a newspaper, so don’t try to read all along the line.
In the case of drawers specifically there was a BBC ban on comedians making comments such as “winter draws on” as it is a double entendre for “winter drawers on”, drawers in this case being a form of undergarment.
In 1949 the phrase “was then included in the BBC’s Green Book as unsuitable for broadcast. In fact, any mention of “Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on” was given ‘an absolute ban’, along with jokes about “Honeymoon couples”, “Fig leaves” and “Animal habits”.”
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/winter-draws-on.html
The only one of these that I actually find funny is Frosty in the 3rd panel. So that one should be the 4th panel.
“Bras” should probably be pronounced /BRAHS/ but some American accents pronounce it /BRAWS/, making it rhyme with “Claus” (which is /KLAWS/, not /KLOWCE/ like the Germanic given name “Klaus”).
Thanks, Powers.
BRAWS and BRAHS are the same to huge portion of the united states including the west coast and Illinois.
Doctor: “Say AH” and “Aw, you’re cute” sound exactly the same. “The fawning faun called Paul saw all brawl for the sought doll. Sod all.” (All be THE, and FOR have the same vowel, albeit the consonants around them make some microsopically longer or softer.
As for Draws and Drawers or may be a regional thing but the vowel in Drawers is pronounces as on O as in FOR. And the vowel in Draws is pronounced as A as in FAR (but without the R which is very definitely pronounced.)
In alt.usage.english, the canonical example of the vowel merger is “cot and caught”. Some places pronounce those identically, others (including where I live) do not.
I wonder if this is the “ghoti = fish” thing. The O in women maybe if recorded and replayed alone may be indistinguishable from the I in fish, but I don’t think any one would claim that they are “pronounced the same” even if they actually … are.
So for all this DRAWS vs DRAHS and cAUGHt vs cAhT where *sure* the surrounding letters make you open your mouth more or it’s softer or breathier… but in the end does it actually sonically make different sounds or do we just imagine they sound different. I’m not convinced there is any difference in sound.
The thing is the same people who insist DRAWS and DRAHS are UTTERly different are the same people who can’t be bothered to tell a wren from a finch. *sigh*
“Bra” is actually short for “brassiere” as in the sentence “One of the contestants at the barbecue contest was injured when he burned his hand on a hot brassiere.”
So, Powers, the fourth panel should have been “Claus on your blouse?”
I agree with Woozy (among others) – Claus and bras rhyme, to me, and drawers is utterly different. So is blouse. Braw, if I pronounce it carefully, is not a brassiere, but if I’m saying it casually I swallow the w and it sounds like brah and the undergarment. And cot and caught are two different sounds.
DARE is a lot of fun (https://www.daredictionary.com/) – I participated in a couple of their surveys, and probably threw it off in weird directions. New Jersey mother, Michigan father, and I grew up overseas with more British (one Scot, several I don’t know but England somewhere) friends than American. I generally say I have a “mid-Atlantic” accent – which means it sounds weird, in different spots, to _everyone_.
I think “Santy in your panties” would have been funnier.
“drawers is utterly different. So is blouse” but the german name Klaus rhymes with blouse. But *no-one* pronounces Santa Claus and Santa Klaus (not even Saint Nicklaus is pronounced like that).
How do you pronounce ‘Jack Nicklaus”?
“I think “Santy in your panties” would have been funnier.”
Double meaning not acceptable for American newspaper comics page. Kids read those!
Or something like that.
In most of North America I think the “Claus/Bras” rhyme works pretty well. “Claus/Drawers” probably only works in New York-influenced dialects (and possibly New Orleans).
Tom Lehrer supposedly once identified a rhyme for “orange” that also only works in some Northeastern dialects: “Eating an orange / while making love / results in bizarre enj- / oyment thereof”
I could actually see someone putting out reindeer hats for cats and calling them Blitzen on your Kitten.