Okay, the extra panels at the left or top get called “throwaways” — but that doesn’t mean they need to be incomprehensible.
Especially when the main comic itself is confusing beyond repair.
P.S. Congratulations to Hilary Price as recipient of the 2024 Reuben Award as 2023 Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Tapas are “small plates”.
“Sporange”??
Philip has it @1; compare the ridiculously small wheels on the truck, matching the microscopic license plate. The reason that the cop is questioning the bribe in the title panel is that the amount of food is too small to be worth anything.
P.S. The difficulty with the “throwaway” panels in “Rhymes with Orange” is not their inscrutability (the additional gags are usually fairly straightforward), but they are almost always best appreciated after the main part of the strip, although their placement makes it difficult to avoid reading them beforehand.
P.P.S. @ Dana (2) – “Sporangia” are the microscopic chambers in which fungi develop their spores.
“Sporangia” are the microscopic chambers in which fungi develop their spores.
Burying the lede: the comic in question is called “Rhymes With Orange”, because supposedly nothing rhymes with “orange”.
Tom Lehrer contributed this bit of doggerel to the question: “Making love / While eating an orange / makes for bizarre enj- / oyment thereof”
@ larK – That bit of Lehrer’s doggerel appears under “Orange / Rhyme” in Wikipedia, but the reference listed there is from a 1982 article in the Washington Post. I was not able to find any source that indicated that Lehrer included that stanza in any of his performances.
“Nothing vexes a rhyming demon more than the word ‘orange.’
“It’s not exact, but in a pinch, I often opt for ‘whore binge.'”
~ Etrigan, The Demon
@kilby: that alines with my recollection, too; it was from an interview in the 90s (I thought!) or so, where he was showing off and tossed off a rhyme for orange like it was just one of several impossible things he did before breakfast.
Thanks, that explains “sporange.” Now, are we meant to make anything out of the post title’s resemblance to that Peter Greenaway movie? Or the one with a thief and a canoe?
@ deety (8) – Probably not, but looking up “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” gave me the opportunity to add one more title to my list of “films I never want to watch or even touch with a ten foot pole”.
Who was it, Arlo Guthrie or Country Joe McDonald or Steve Miller or somebody who offered “door hinge” …?
As always, part of the rhyming problem is how a particular person pronounces it. I have know those who say ARE-anj or OR-anj. I’m of the almost monosyllabic group with “ornj”.
“Month” is also difficult to rhyme. The best you can do is write a poem about a mathematician who thought the answer would be two to the nth but it turned out to be two to the n plus one-th.
“There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns: Blorenge and Gorringe. The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname” – QI: The Book of General Ignorance – The Noticeably Stouter Edition, by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
I’ve been on the Blorenge, as it happens. The other two hills near Abergavenny are The Skirrid and Sugar Loaf. Been on them, too.
Brian, you were mentioning variation in the first vowel. I was a little surprised by some suggestions earlier in this thread which seemed to use a variation in the second vowel — “door hinge” and “whore binge”. So I wonder if what you call your almost-monosyllabic pronunciation “ornj” would also fit pretty well with those “-inge” rhymes.
But “tapas” is Spanish for “tops”, as in “pot tops”. It’s the same word in origin. ????
I’m always confused by this orange rhyming thing. Why do both syllables of the word need to rhyme?
For example, I think most would agree that ‘something’ rhymes with ‘ring’, or ‘famous’ rhymes with ‘bus’. In the same way, why doesn’t any other word that ends with an ‘inge’ sound rhyme with ‘orange’? Orange, syringe, binge, singe, fringe, etc.
I’m aware there are rules for what constitutes a true rhyme, but still, in my mind, the examples above rhyme perfectly well with ‘orange’. I can’t be alone.
Stan, it depends what syllable the stress (“accent”) is on.
If you hadn’t specified “something” we could just note that “thing” and “ring” do rhyme, and move on.
But you did specify “something” , but you didn’t say what comes before “ring”, and that will make a difference since SOMEthing has penultimate (next-to-last) stress. The stressed syllable needs to rhyme, and all those following it. (It’s rare that we are dealing with more than two) For some commentators, if there is stress on the penult, those syllables should rhyme and the final syllables would need not just to rhyme but be identical.
On the less restrictive formulation, to rhyme with SOMEthing we need to have a word or syllable before “ring” that can take the stress and rhyme with SOME. So “BUM ring” or “THUMB ring” would work.
On the more restrictive formulation, those would not Work. And indeed, “ring” with any preceding word would not work. To rhyme “SOMEthing” you need “__UM thing” — it would have to be “thing” in the final unstressed syllable, not just a rhyme like “ring”.
To return to ORinj, we are not asking “both syllables to rhyme” but something a little harder! We are asking the first syllables to rhyme and the final syllables to be identical. Or, on the less restrictive formulation, we are, just as you say, asking both syllables to rhyme — thus allowing the “door hinge” and “whore binge” examples. And why both? Because the final syllables are unstressed, and the penults are stressed. So we have to have all syllables from the stressed ones onward rhyming.
And to apply those principles to your other example, we can’t really answer whether “famous” and “bus” rhyme, other than as isolated words. If you were writing metrical verse, with rhyming, to rhyme a line ending with “FAMous” we would need a line ending with “SAME bus” or the like.
And though you soon became famous,
We saw you still rode on the same bus!
(And that would be called “near rhyme” or “off rhyme” by some people, as the unstressed final syllables do rhyme but are not identical.) But under less-strict principles they are a good “feminine” (two-syllable) rhyme.
Dana K
So, this doesn’t rhyme?
“The royalties from being famous,
Allowed me to buy a brand new bus.”
And though you soon became famous
We saw you still rode on the “Eight” Bus
No, these lines don’t REALLY rhyme, but you could get away with it in light verse, with the assonance in the penultimate syllables standing in for full rhyme.
And though you soon became famous,
We saw you still rode on the “Six” Bus
Nope, those are a real No!
On top of the junk for the bus
Was a man who made much of a fuss
These lines definitely do rhyme! It’s the final syllables that take stress, and they are a good “masculine” (one-syllable) rhyme. And we don’t care about the penultimate syllables at all!
And Stan’s later example:
“The royalties from being famous,
Allowed me to buy a brand new bus.”
I would again say not quite a full rhyme, but you could use it in light verse or song lyrics, like the assonance example in a previous comment (the Eight Bus).
Here are some lines from the first verse of “Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan:
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
For a long time I thought of this as four lines on the same rhyme, but slightly off — so an AAAA rhyme scheme, or let’s say AA’AA’.
But no! If you look at the same positions of lines in other verses, you see they all are clearly ABAB. So it’s best to understand this one that way too, and the sounds for the A and B line endings are cleverly similar enough to garden-path us into hearing them as imperfect rhyme.
(I’m smoothing over some difficulties there! For one thing, there are three other lines first, before these four, so they’re not really the ABAB. More like AAABCBCDD where these four are the BCBC. Also, the subsequent verses aren’t really strict about that pattern, grouping the rhymes differently in some cases)
It’s all good. Thanks for the insights folks, but I’ve been through these arguments with others before, and on those occasions too I’ve been clearly informed about how the English language officially rhymes despite how it sounds. Seriously, I’ve just got to let it go, or…
My hair of orange
Will singe
And cringe
Like a sharp pull
From a purple
Tractor.
(Shakespeare eat your heart out!)
“Orange” and “cringe” don’t rhyme at all, because the vowel sound is different. It’s as if you rhymed “cat” and “spit”.
W.S. Gilbert was not above changing the stress in a line or the pronunciation of a word in order to make a rhyme work.
I don’t know Ira Gershwin or Tom Lehrer ever went quite that far, but they came close.
Tom Lehrer:
When you go attend a funeral
It is sad to think that sooner ul-
ater those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic
Not to mention other adjec
tives to think of all the weeping they will do.
@Carl Fink – Do you say orr-ANGE, to rhyme with (…well, not rhyme with…) ‘range’ or ‘change’? That’s interesting. Where I’m from, it’s pronounced it orr-INGE.
Stan, it’s really a whole new ball game if you stress “orange” on the second syllable, regardless of whether it’s what you show as orr-ANGE or orr-INGE. I don’t know anybody who says either orr-ANGE or orr-INGE.
And a LARGE — ORANGE — DRINK!! Say it! Say it!
Ok, ok … A LARGE — ORANGE — DRINK — PLEASE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4EuZIcHxE0
Danny Boy – Apologies, I wasn’t trying to indicate the stress, I was just highlighting how second syllable sounds…at least to me. Sorry for the confusion.
Thanks for that Demented clip!
Sorry, for me that Demented clip was just supremely irritating, no humor whatsoever. But it did remind me of one of the Honorable Mentions (by Leif Picoult) in Week 83 of the Invitational (Assignment: identify the “meaning” of any one of a dozen different “nonsense” sounds):
Sound: “Gliddy glub gloopy, nibby nabby noopy“:
… Meaning: Every order confirmation at a drive-thru.
A limerick from a recent Invitational