And the joke is that…. well, objects on very different scales, named by nouns, can be modified by the very same possessive… Halley can by name take ownership or identification of objects as different as a worldwide visible comet and an ordinary domestic breakfast… Are we getting warm?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The tags and the editorial subtitle are not just warm, they are right on the money. This is Kliban, whom Wikipedia describes as drawing “…extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness“. In comparison to that, the diptych shown above is a fairly pedestrian juxtaposition of possessive attributes.
P.S. Kliban’s original comic is at least three decades old, but still I’m not sure that it has benefitted from his widow’s retroactive coloration. We have encountered this editorial issue before, in the Approved post.
Kliban also had another comic where an old guy looking at the comet cries “There goes that rotten Halley’s Comet! It makes me sick! I want to vomet!”
Perhaps both comics were influenced by the mid-80s hoopla surrounding the return of Halley’s comet to visible distance from Earth, if not outright commenting on what Kliban may have found silly about all the fuss (though neither were printed in his collection books that were released post-1986). Of course, its Kliban, so he may have just been drawing stuff that amused him, as often seemed the case.
Breakfast once every 76 years or so? Sounds like carrying intermittent fasting to the extreme.
When I was a kid, the comet was always pronounced with a long ‘a’. I recall when I realized that I would likely be around for the return and how cool that would be. In the lead up to the reappearance, the pronunciation shifted to a short ‘a’. Then, of course, the return was a huge flop.
In the name of the early rock’n’roll group Bill Haley & His Comets AFAIK the name was always pronounced with the long A. Which is pretty much required from the Haley spelling, while as you point out Halley invites either. But for Haley to think his name was a cinch for fitting with Comets, he must have been hearing Halley’s Comet pronounced his way.
From what I understand, the correct pronunciation is Hawley.
For those familiar with the Doctor Demento radio show, the good Dr. did a set of songs in a show in 1986 relating to Halley’s Comet.
Here is a decade-old podcast (unrelated to Dr. Demento) that played some songs from that set. Thankfully it’s archived, as the tracks are hard to find online otherwise.
Skip to around the 5-min mark for the three comet songs. First will be a piano rag instrumental. At the 8-min mark is “Cometary Commentary” by the Hairy Wanderers. This one spoofs the various ways the comet’s name had been butchered.
[audio src="https://archive.org/details/A-logOnTheAirwaves-71412specialTopic1986/A-logOnTheAirwaves-7-14-12theBonusRound.mp3" /]
Note there was a fourth track played in Dr. D’s set that isn’t part of the podcast. This is “An Account Of Haley’s Comet” by John Stewart (one of the original Kingston Trio guys). This can be found on YouTube.
I have found that there is no such thing as a “correct” pronunciation as far as British names are concerned — case in point, David Bowie: I have heard British television personalities, within the same programme, pronounce it like bow-tie and like bow-wow, without anyone seeming to notice. In fact I have heard Richard Ayoade go back and forth between the two in the same show, with no one else “correcting” him!
(To be fair, maybe British English speakers just don’t hear a difference between bow as in bow tie and bow as in bow-wow, like I can’t hear a difference between aspirated and unaspirated stops like “t” or “p”, which in some languages is a distinctive difference (so st-hop-h would be a different word from stop?), and if so, I’d like to know which and how many such non-differences exist between the Englishes?)
Let’s say there is a person named Full, who happens to own a toy spinning top. Now repeat alternating (articulating as in rapid casual speech — make up a sentence if need be):
1) Full’s top
2) Full stop
I’m sure you hear a difference. Some phonologists would have called this a difference in “juncture”, which it surely is — but that leaves the question of just what the difference in juncture consists in, in this case. And the answer would mostly be in whether the /t/ is aspirated.
I learned how to say J K Rowling’s name (it’s “rolling”) just in time to have people responding “Now why would you want to talk about /her/?!”
Not to mention Samuel Pepys.
As I understand it, Bowie pronounced it to rhyme with “throw”. Sounding like “crowd” is very common amongst Scots I believe.
I had to look it up, but in the US the famous Bowie knife should be pronounced Boo-wie. I had no idea.
The pop star had this to say about the pronunciation of his stage name:
“Less and less as Bowie [like ‘boh-ee’], Bowie [like ‘wow-ee’], Bowie [like ‘boo-ee’] – I don’t even know how to pronounce it any more, I’ve lost track,” he replied. “I always thought it was ‘boh-ee,’ I thought it’s a Scottish name, it must be ‘boh-ee,’ but no-one in Scotland pronounces it like that, they pronounce it ‘boo-ee’ I think.”
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/talk-like-texan-pronunciation-bowie/
@Grawlix
I mean, (Paul Revere and) the Raiders had a #1 hit with a song where they mispronounce the Bowie in Bowie knife, so it’s a pretty common and rarely corrected mispronunciation. Being from Texas, I learned the “boo-wie” pronunciation as it related to Jim Bowie and the knife at a young age and found myself getting chuckled at as a young adult for assuming the same pronunciation for David Bowie.