Sometimes the intent and joke are clear, but you have the feeling there is a tiny bit of disappointment over a detail that is wrong, or at any rate could be improved.
Don’t you want the first panel to say “take requests” instead of “play requests”?
All right, a good point to be making. But it takes too much work to confirm that the two structureless and unparseable series of terms differ only in the first position, where one has senior and the other junior. Why can’t the series be more varied? Say, throw in a deputy or associate or adjunct. Go ask the second second assistant director (actual title on some film crews).
This Wrong Hands doesn’t quite work for me (==mitch). But maybe that’s because I don’t have the same vowel in fraud and frog. Is it better for someone who does?
My complaint here is trivial but it doesn’t stop bothering me, and distracting from the joke. The Joker is ALWAYS wild. Many times he is not included in the game, sure, but that doesn’t make him non-wild.
I wanted to pair this with a Bizarro I saw making almost the same joke, and with almost the same problem. It had both a Joker and a 2, and seemed to again attribute the part-time wildness to the Joker; when there was the opportunity to instead use our knowledge that “Deuces wild” is one of those dealer’s-choice options that would serve to make the 2 sometimes wild and sometimes not! The trouble is, that Bizarro was the June 2023 page on an official Bizarro hanging calendar on my wall, hence not so easily downloadable.
Well y’know what? That’s not an insuperable problem …
And, seeing it again, I should retract the claim that this one gets it wrong too. Here the Joker sometimes doesn’t feel like being wild, but is condemned to wildness always; and he is envious of the therapist deuce, for whom wildness is a sometime thing.
Comics I Don't Understand 
No, I don’t use the same vowel in frog and fraud – and for that matter, I don’t think I know anyone who does.
Whether or not this is the reason, the Wrong Hands doesn’t work well for me.
I personally don’t consider the change of vowel to be all that big a leap. Which of those two words are the rest of you pronouncing, well, like, “wrong”? :-)
P.S. When syndicates use comics in other products, they usually rub off the serial numbers (removing, for instance, the syndication line and the date). King Features didn’t do that on the calendar, so I really don’t know why getting the download link would be such a problem.
No, getting the download link was not “such a problem”. :-) But when I was focused on recalling what other cartoon the Andertoons was reminding me of, and finally found it in the Bizarro wall calendar, I kept that focus while concentrating on taking a picture. Only after that did I notice the date. And I didn’t thereupon chase down and substitute that image, as I figured it would be fun for some reader or other to do that!
I’m pretty sure the Bizarro handles the joke better. (Thanks Mitch, nice calendar)
I tried to read the speech bubble for the Real Life Adventures…. but I still have no idea what it means.
@ Maggie (4) – The cartoonist overdid it (possibly thinking that the impossible un-readability was supposed to be part of the joke), but the point of the gag is simply a comparison between two meaninglessly trivial job descriptions that differ in only one term out of five (and in both cases, three of the five terms are “assistant”). The whole thing could have been simplified by making the first description read “junior dweeb“, whereas this guy would be starting as a lofty “senior dweeb“.
There was a credit card ad a few years ago that had the phone bank person saying the card had fraud protection, while the caller kept asking about frog protection (while holding a pet frog). So, yes, frog/fraud is a thing.
Also: “How much to not practice?” “Ah, you couldn’t afford us.”
From dictionary.com
frog – in IPA / frɒg, frɔg / in “phonetic respelling” [ frog, frawg ]
fraud – in IPA / frɔd /, in “phonetic respelling” [ frawd ]
wrong – in IPA / rɔŋ, rɒŋ / , in “phonetic respelling” [ rawng, rong ]
strong – in IPA / strɔŋ, strɒŋ / , in “phonetic respelling” [ strawng, strong ]
straw – in IPA / strɔ / , in “phonetic respelling” [ straw ]
aw – in IPA / ɔ / , in “phonetic respelling” [ aw ]
awe – same as “aw”
Notice that “wrong” offers the same two vowel choices as does “frog”, but in reverse order of support. And, to return to our original question, the preferred pronunciation of “frog” does not agree with the (sole) pronunciation of “fraud”, though the secondary one does.
From Merriam-Webster (which only uses a single system for showing pronunciations — supplemented by audio!)
frog – ˈfrȯg ˈfräg
fraud – ‘frȯd
wrong – ˈrȯŋ (no alternative offered)
strong – ˈstrȯŋ (no alternative offered)
straw – ˈstrȯ
aw and awe- ˈȯ
Before looking these up, I would have guessed that the vowel of wrong and strong because of coming just before a nasal consonant, could have been claimed as slightly different from that of straw and awe. But not so, apparently.
Well, I certainly was not saying that nobody pronounces frog and fraud similarly — some do, as DVD’s anecdote and Danny’s library-research both show. But I still think the success of this cartoon depends on the reader being in that set of speakers, and that it falls a little flat for people (like me) who say them differently.
@ Mitch (8) – I’ve tried (and failed) to come up with acceptable pronunciations of those two words that would be so far apart as to render the intended gag inaccessible. Even if you don’t say them exactly the same way, I still think it’s close enough to be audibly apparent.
P.S. I wonder how well the joke would have worked if Atkinson had selected a more colorful species of “Toad“:
P.P.S. As for “non-working rhymes”, even as a kid I had major problems with a number of verses and poems in the “Tales of Mother Goose“. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that a large part of the problem wasn’t just British versus American English, but also that the pronunciation of many words had shifted significantly since those rhymes were collected in text versions (my favorite example is the non-rhyme between “water” and “after” in “Jack & Jill“).
@Mitch: I’m with you that the frog/fraud thing doesn’t really work; my thinking is that the problem lies not with the vowel, but the final stop, frog being a back glottal stop and fraud being front alveolar/dental stop. In my mind, these are two very different sounds, not because they sound different, but because they are produced in such different areas of the tongue; I’m not a natural ventriloquist, and because these sounds are produced in different mouth position fashions, I categorize them as different sounds, even though they may not actually sound much different! My mind was blown away when someone casually mentioned that, especially on the radio, the difference between “NPR” and “MPR” was non-distinguishable — because I produce those two sounds very differently, I assume they are very different, when in fact they are not…
So maybe this strip would work better if someone read it to you instead of your reading it yourself.
To me (of British persuasion) Frog and Fraud sound quite different, and not just because of a different last letter. Frog is short, Og, and Fraud is longish, Frawwed. The usefulness of my explanation is limited, though, if you pronounce Ogg like Awwgg.
I can imagine being confused between the two if the voice artists responsible for Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse were to say that the resident bad guy, the cigar-chomping Frog, was convicted of Fraud. See, for instance, a couple of Frog examples in the seconds after https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA6_T0mWq4Y at 1m13 secs
Frog and fraud are awfully close if not identical for me.
Er, vowel-wise I mean. Like GoComics comments, there’s no way to edit here. There, however, you can delete your comments, so delete and corrected repost is possible.
Brian, and is that with the “aw” vowel in both words?
A similar thing happens when different syllables are accented. Our native Italian Italian teacher (there has got to be a more elegant way to get that across) said that someone had gone to the canneries. When the class was confused she said like the island of dogs. More confused until she said yellow bird. The syllables are pronounced the same just different emphasis. BTW, she was spot on because the Canaries were named after dogs.
Lola, that reminds me of a 1950s sort-of-novelty song that was covered by the late Harry Belafonte (and which I heard small bits of recently because they were in some of the memorial broadcasts for him). Sadly, it is not ripe for much contemporary play, as there is something problematic about it, in that it is based on having fun with perceptions of how a Caribbean (maybe specifically Jamaican) accent is done. …. You put the acCENT upon the wrong sylLOBBLe and you siiiiing.
Here it is, performed by (yikes!) the Andrews Sisters. (You can ignore any comments from a certain Mmarks4.)
P.S. The lyrics seem to locate it specifically in Trinidad.
@ Lola – “… when different syllables are accented”
That reminds me of an incident in college, in which a Chinese graduate student said something to me that I found extremely bothersome. The information in her sentence is not relevant here, the problem that her intonation made it sound like a fourth-grader’s “nyaa-nyaa-nyaa” insult. I had to think about it for a second, and realized that she was probably applying some sort of (native) Chinese intonation on top of the English words, and that I should just discount the melody, and concentrate on the content.
Brian, and is that with the “aw” vowel in both words?
Indeed.
Here it is, performed by (yikes!) the Andrews Sisters. (You can ignore any comments from a certain Mmarks4.)
Relatively easy to ignore the comments as I didn’t see any.
Though I did not burst out laughing, I did find the comic amusing.
I rhyme “frog” with log, fog and dog,
and pronounce the dipthong in “fraud” similarly (short o), rhyming with “odd”. I have listened to soundbites found via Google and can hear no difference.
Frog and Fraud are considered alliterative here, along with fraught: https://azrhymes.com/alliterations?q=frog
Note that along with poetry, wordplay doesn’t have to involve airtight perfect rhyme.
Re: The non-rhyme between “water” and “after” in “Jack & Jill“
It seems to me they do rhyme, with the “-ter” suffix. :-)
Close enough for poetry.
:-p
Re: Kilby #5
I think reducing the joke to “Senior/Junior Dweeb” leaves out too much. To me the point is the multilayered positions: Assistants for assistant assistants (etc.), and that the agency thought those in turn needed Junior and Senior grades. And why not throw in terms such as “Deputy”, etc as suggested a the header? That might well have worked as well, but for me the repetition of “assistant” is part of the humor.
@ Grawlix (22) – I agree that the tortured phrasing is a part of the intended gag, telescoping it all down to “dweeb” was for demonstration purposes. I can see the purpose of using the term “assistant” more than once, but what I object to most is putting two of them adjacent, making the phrase (as Maggie noted) nearly impossible to parse. The cartoonist could have helped by making the dialog bubble wider, so that each of those verbal juggernauts would have fit onto one (unlikely!) or at most two lines, instead of three. (I was about to suggest that he could have used a narrower font, but the text appears to be hand-lettered.)
P.S. Rhyming just on the very last syllable is lowball poetry; according to that criterion nearly every German infinitive would qualify as a rhyme (because they all end in “-en“).
Right, it might have helped to swap in a “deputy” for one of the “assistants”, say.
@ Mitch (24) – As someone (you?) already pointed out immediately below the comic.
Third junior assistant acting undersecretary to the deputy associate subminister breveted to the temporary auxiliary branch of the advisory board’s alternate council. Second class.
Isn’t there a Python sketch about this, or am I thinking of Blackadder?
Toads are frogs. It’s just a common name for a stumpy frog with dry skin.
@ Dave (26) – It might be Python, but it’s definitely not Blackadder.
@Dave, nicely chosen compound title!
Without making it lengthy, the American version of The Office made hay over the years from the difference between “Assistant Regional Manager” and “Assistant to the Regional Manager”.
Strip 1 –
I come from a family of “listeners” – as in we listen to music as we are all tone deaf, but we also love music and to sing. Robert early in our dating came to my parents house and I was playing the piano when he came in. He asked what I was playing and when I told him – he said it had not sounded anything like that.
Generally I cannot recognize a song unless it is being sung and I can rely on the words or there is something very distinct about its music. At one point he decided I needed to recognize a late 18th century song by the music as it served as a “national” anthem during the American Revolution (and no, it is not any of the popular, common songs of the period). Whenever we were at reenactment he would ask “What song is this?” when it was being played. I would say that I didn’t know and he would tell me it was that song. 18th century tends to sound much alike to me. Not being that stupid of a person I realized he asked this only when this song was played and quickly started always saying it was that song. He was so happy that he had taught me to recognize the song. Then we were somewhere and he asked me what the song was – unfortunately it was a different song and he found out how I had (not) “learned” to recognize that song by its music.