A little bit mean … but still quite funny.
A brain-painful LOL from Chemgal:
Inspiration!
This almost went into the Oys list, since there is a play on a sort of ambiguity of where. This was a favorite joke-form of a friend of mine who knew Ulysses inside-out after teaching it to undergrads at Millard Fillmore College in Buffalo, and dubbed these “on the canal bank” jokes. It was from this bit, in the final chapter:
I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father
Comics I Don't Understand 
Thanks for reminding me why I never finished Ulysses.
. . . and making sure I never start it . . .
…and reminding me that I really want to reread it again soon. . . .
–Show us where he touched you, on the doll
–He didn’t touch me on the doll
For those (including me) who have not read Ulysses and wonder about editorm’s quote from the final chapter, the entire final chapter is Molly Bloom thinking about her past.
Thanks, Kevin A. And for anyone new to it, and put off by the mostly-unpunctuated stream of semi-consciousness, that is not what most of the book is like.
I was half surprised to find the passage in Molly’s soliloquy, thinking it might be from an earlier chapter where we deal with some priests in person; or perhaps Gerty MacDowell on the beach. But – another surprise – plain text is apparently so compact that the Project Gutenberg version of Ulysses (plain text in HTML with just one image, for the cover) is in one single file, making a single web page, fast to load, and easy to scroll and text-search. I got no result for “your body” [in the passage the phrase turns out to be “your person”], but “the canal bank” took it right here.
BTW, when Kevin A mentions “For those … who … wonder about editorm’s quote from the final chapter” it happens that he is correct and I did write the editorial note for the last comic, the Shoe, as reflected in the posting stamp “JULY 17, 2022 by EDITORM“.
But please note that WordPress only uses single posting account attributions, and may be misleading when more than one of the co-editors has had a hand in any particular post (blog entry). This is especially likely with the multi-comic posts presenting lists, like the Saturday OYs or Sunday LOLs. In fact yesterday’s OYs post, though stamped “JULY 16, 2022 by EDITORM” , included a couple of comics inserted and remarked by other editors.
Just recently I was browsing in the “foreign language literature” section of a mid-sized German bookstore. I didn’t find anything that I wanted to read, but I noticed that they had a copy of (you guessed it) “Ulysses” lurking on one of the shelves. Never having been forced to read it (and knowing it only by reputation as being “even worse than Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’”), I decided that I could at least take a look. I was not surprised to find that the text was far too “dense” for me, but I was amused that the lines were numbered, presumably for reference purposes, almost like a Bible.
That sounds like the post-1986 edition, from “The Corrected Text”, with indeed marginal line numbers, numbering within chapters. Another hardcopy I have is from the 1961 Modern Library edition, with marginal page numbers for the pagination of a previous edition.
It was conventional (at one time, at least) in Finnegans Wake scholarship to use a sort of decimal notation for page and line, such as 35.-3 for page 35, 3rd line up from bottom.
I enjoy how much Andertoons is able to convey, with the limited tools he seems to allow himself. Here I mean the witness’s demeanor, which really does seem to capture “passive aggressive” with just a few pen strokes.
Ah. Then, if ever needed again, I will identify such a quote as one contained in the “editorial comment ..” or something similar.
(I found it very challenging to reference the person referencing the quote while referencing the quote as context for my giving the context of the quote. [<- Ooo, another one.] And so I am quite happy that, by chance, the comment was correct. Reading Mitch4’s comment on how I could not have actually known who to acknowledge was like a Twilight Zone moment after my effort to get it right.)
Kevin A, I know that makes it slippery, but there aren’t expected to be repercussions to readers making assumptions that might be right or wrong. And we have left ourselves the option of internally signing editorial notes in posts if we feel like differentiating them.
Speaking of words with double meanings . . .
“What’s on the telly?”
“Looks like a penguin.”
There was discussion in the comments about that one. It’s not a terribly typical phrasing versus, “What’s on TV?” or even “What’s on?”
Arnold Zwicky’s blog, at https://arnoldzwicky.org/2022/07/22/classic-joke-444/ , looks at the same Shoe cartoon from this post, plus part of the same Ulysses quote which someone tweeted to him. (A quick look at the Twitter account he credits does appear to possibly line up with a CIDU commenter.)
He also goes into detail on other varieties of the where ambiguity, illustrated in comics. Plus some non-illustrated joke lines:
“She got pinched in the As … tor Bar”
(Patient) I broke my leg in three places — (Doctor) Then don’t go to those places
Another example of the where ambiguity, from Andy Capp: