This is from Andréa (and was a CIDU for Winter Wallaby, until Andréa explained it):
And this one from Chemgal:
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A chorus of Polish teens singing “Yellow Rose of Texas” is not something you forget in a mere 46 years.
Downpuppy, care to tell us more about that memory?
I was about 16. Family had spent a year abroad & accumulated too much stuff to fly home, so we took the TSS Stefan Batory. Spent a week on the north Atlantic, playing bridge, drinking beer (legally), & getting seasick. At the end, the ship anchored on the St Lawrence at Quebec & the youth chorus (who I hadn’t seen on board all week) put on a show. Yellow Rose is a pretty terrible song, but they managed to make it worse.
I guess I understand the Cliff Notes one, basically, but I wasn’t familiar with saying something like “performance fell off a cliff this quarter” for a graph like the one on the right.
:::is sad that water pollo isn’t a real thing::: Also, yellow rows of taxis? Brilliant!
Susan is sad that water pollo isn’t a real thing
I want to make (pun-)sense of “Marco pollo”
Is there more going on in the taxi comic than just a pun on the song title?
Oh, I’m Melvin Rose of Texas . . .
… My friends all call me Tex …
… When I lived in old New Mexico …
… They used to call me Mex …
“All my friends call me Tex.”
“Is that because you’re from Texas?”
“No. I’m from Maryland but why would I want to be called Mary?”
When I lived in old Kentucky . . .
Now I want to see Bizarro do something with “Pollo Theater”, “Pollo 11 landing” or “Pollo 13”
When I lived in old Kentucky
They called me Old Kentuck…
When I lived in old Cockburn…
They called you Burnie?
Allan Sherman’s concluding lines:
I was born in old Shamokin
Which is why they call me Melvin Rose
I think the doesn’t-rhyme joke is that the pattern-following completion would have been “they call me jamoke”.
They would’ve called him “Schmuck.”
They would’ve called him “Schmuck.”
That makes sense to rhyme with “Ol Kentuck'”. I was thinking along those lines, but stuck on forms of the f-word — “schmuck” is a better suggestion for his schtick. (BTW, this comes from “Shticks and Stones” a cut on the first album.)
But the pattern earlier in the bit was not actually final-syllable rhyme, but a little subtler:
Oh I’m Melvin Rose of Texas
And my friends all call me Tex
When I lived in old New Mexico
They used to call me Mex
When I lived in old Kentucky
They called me Old Kentuck
I was born in old Shamokin
Which is why they call me Melvin Rose
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. The issue is “where did the Mex come from” and I am seeing it pulled directly from Mexico regardless of the rhyme on Tex. But that seems to want to draw the final nickname from Shamokin somehow. I dunno.
Mitch, it looks like you are being a bit thick on this. The “schmuck” answer from MDBrown answers to /both/ rhyming with Kentuck and matching the beginning of Shamokin .
I would have thought that “The Yellow Rose of Texas” was a song best forgotten but perhaps only geezers like me remember its meaning.
Stan Freberg (in the persona of a gung-ho Texan bedeviled by his drummer accompanist) had a great comedic rif on “Yellow Rose of Texas” back in the day.
As a kid way back, we had the Allan Sherman album with that and many other ditties. I assumed that Shamokin was a city out east with a high Jewish population, hence the Melvin Rose.
Comics I Don't Understand 
A chorus of Polish teens singing “Yellow Rose of Texas” is not something you forget in a mere 46 years.
Downpuppy, care to tell us more about that memory?
I was about 16. Family had spent a year abroad & accumulated too much stuff to fly home, so we took the TSS Stefan Batory. Spent a week on the north Atlantic, playing bridge, drinking beer (legally), & getting seasick. At the end, the ship anchored on the St Lawrence at Quebec & the youth chorus (who I hadn’t seen on board all week) put on a show. Yellow Rose is a pretty terrible song, but they managed to make it worse.
I guess I understand the Cliff Notes one, basically, but I wasn’t familiar with saying something like “performance fell off a cliff this quarter” for a graph like the one on the right.
:::is sad that water pollo isn’t a real thing::: Also, yellow rows of taxis? Brilliant!
Susan
is sad that water pollo isn’t a real thingI want to make (pun-)sense of “Marco pollo”
Is there more going on in the taxi comic than just a pun on the song title?
Oh, I’m Melvin Rose of Texas . . .
… My friends all call me Tex …
… When I lived in old New Mexico …
… They used to call me Mex …
“All my friends call me Tex.”
“Is that because you’re from Texas?”
“No. I’m from Maryland but why would I want to be called Mary?”
When I lived in old Kentucky . . .
Now I want to see Bizarro do something with “Pollo Theater”, “Pollo 11 landing” or “Pollo 13”
When I lived in old Kentucky
They called me Old Kentuck…
When I lived in old Cockburn…
They called you Burnie?
Allan Sherman’s concluding lines:
I was born in old Shamokin
Which is why they call me Melvin Rose
I think the doesn’t-rhyme joke is that the pattern-following completion would have been “they call me jamoke”.
They would’ve called him “Schmuck.”
They would’ve called him “Schmuck.”That makes sense to rhyme with “Ol Kentuck'”. I was thinking along those lines, but stuck on forms of the f-word — “schmuck” is a better suggestion for his schtick. (BTW, this comes from “Shticks and Stones” a cut on the first album.)
But the pattern earlier in the bit was not actually final-syllable rhyme, but a little subtler:
Oh I’m Melvin Rose of Texas
And my friends all call me Tex
When I lived in old New Mexico
They used to call me Mex
When I lived in old Kentucky
They called me Old Kentuck
I was born in old Shamokin
Which is why they call me Melvin Rose
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. The issue is “where did the Mex come from” and I am seeing it pulled directly from Mexico regardless of the rhyme on Tex. But that seems to want to draw the final nickname from Shamokin somehow. I dunno.
Mitch, it looks like you are being a bit thick on this. The “schmuck” answer from MDBrown answers to /both/ rhyming with Kentuck and matching the beginning of Shamokin .
I would have thought that “The Yellow Rose of Texas” was a song best forgotten but perhaps only geezers like me remember its meaning.
Stan Freberg (in the persona of a gung-ho Texan bedeviled by his drummer accompanist) had a great comedic rif on “Yellow Rose of Texas” back in the day.
As a kid way back, we had the Allan Sherman album with that and many other ditties. I assumed that Shamokin was a city out east with a high Jewish population, hence the Melvin Rose.