(This is under the “not really a pun but word play in general” tag.)
Thanks to Andréa for this Bizarro:
I’m sure I’ve seen this joke used before, but not whether that means this is a repeat or just that the joke has occurred to others. A cursory search does find other examples, and tempting as it is to make a whole post out of three or four of them, let’s leave it at that.
From Andréa:
Just a bit corny.
And a little Oy-Ewww on the side.
Thanks to Matthew McKeever, who sent this as a CIDU and says: “another stumper … … and I went to parochial school”
Should Chef Boyardee should be canonized (as a saint in heaven) or sent to the other place? Or maybe it’s the corporate moneygrubbers who own the brand (currently Conagra Foods) who should be sent someplace?
This took me a minute, as I don’t often use “home” for a physical house, the building.
For anyone not familiar with the comic, the character on the right, Lyndon, is a psychiatrist or therapist. So Freudian slips are like his stock in trade. But there is something funny in how this patient or client responds to the “Say again?” with an almost-repetition and not acknowledging he has made a correction.
An excellent OY that also had me at least chuckling out loud.
(But I have to confess I don’t know who the guy on the right is. I hope his identity wasn’t another part of the joke.)
Thanks to Rob for these next two OYs (and some hard-to-classify strips coming up elsewhere on the site):
I guess I’m wrong here — I would have said this doesn’t work unless he actually says “Heckuva” (variation possible for the c and/or k, but the v obligatory). But the crowd at GoComics seemed to take it in stride.
And a Sandal Synchronicity:
This Mother Goose and Grimm is analyzed at Arnold Zwicky’s blog.
I also posted this F-Minus, with remarks, in a comment on that same Zwicky blog entry.
Several selections contributed by Andréa coming up:
“I KNEW IMMEDIATELY WHO THIS WAS, EVEN BEFORE READING THE CAPTION . . . DOES THAT MAKE ME A GEEZER??”
Synchronicity–
This Bizarro from Andréa is also taken up under the Arnold Zwicky analytical microscope. I like his term “a Desert Crawl cartoon” for the main trope here.
“SYNCHRONICITY – ABOUT *NOT* LEARNING A LESSON . . .”
And one final OY contribution:
An OY from Andréa:
Andréa spotted this one for us:
All right, so it’s just not possible that he is learning this for the first time now. But it’s still a nice pun.
Let’s just allude to the story-pun that ends with “He’s a dead ringer for his brother”!
This Bizarro is from Andréa.
This DSOH from Andréa and others:
This is just a blah. But can we improve it?
Sure, there’s a fix just calling out to us! Change the thought balloon to “Can I come up with the atomic symbol for Sodium?” and the bottom caption to “Na, he can’t.”
Other improvements from y’all?
And on this train of thought, for those with trigonometric inclinations, “Can he remember the sixth of the basic circular functions?” and the answer “No, of ____ __ ___ “.
This Breaking Cat News comes from Andréa as a problem of the physics. “Won’t the eggs fall out if they’re in the holder like this? I’ve not dyed eggs for YEARS, but I distinctly remember putting the egg in the holder small end DOWN . . .”
Here’s a new sub-category. It’s not LOL material, there is no joke to be understood, and it’s not a comic flop either. It’s just something you gotta see!
A “quickie CIDU” because it is entirely opaque while misinterpreting the artwork; then becomes a clear and simple joke the instant you re-interpret the artwork.
I think we’ve argued this point before: If a question is posed which is not answered within the comic itself, and is not clearly discernible after thinking about it, can we say “Well there isn’t meant to be an answer, but that’s part of why it’s meant to be funny”? On this one I just don’t get it.
Oh but wait! This was the 4-19 panel so of course it was a 4-20 joke. Ermmm.
Well this one might be called a second-take CIDU. I thought I had gotten it, or enough for a chuckle, when originally reading it – the guy hanging on the wall is a (baseball) catcher, and is the ideal one for the husband/fan-guy, so is his “dream” catcher. But the offstage wife takes that phrasing to mean a “dreamcatcher” wall hanging, whose proper placement she issues a reminder about. I didn’t give any significance to the nickname “Pudge” which the husband bestows on the catcher.
But then now Mark M sends it in and notes some complicating factors: I’m thinking if you’re not a MLB fan AND a geezer, this comic will be confusing. I’m both and it’s still confusing. Pudge was a nickname for Carlton Fisk, who played as a catcher some 50 years ago. A very good player, so “dream catcher” is a great pun. Maybe this belongs as an Oy or LOL. But the CIDU part is the response in Spanish. Fisk was born in the U.S. and had no Latino connections that I’m aware of. And then there’s maybe even more to this if we start to worry about him saying “This is how it works” which may go on only some readings.
(P.S. A few days later, he got down from that wall, and the husband caught him rifling in their liquor cabinet, and strewn about him were several bottles of this family’s favorite kind of American distilled grain whiskey. Which made him the catcher in the rye.)
And that explains the smell of gas around here …
Chemgal sent this in, and classifies it as an Oy, but avers that she did LOL at it too.
And a final item from Andréa:
Whenever confronted with people who like to insist that JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner meant that he was calling himself a pastry, I like to think of alternate stories where a President needs to reinforce our commitment to Denmark.
Thanks to Andréa, who called it a “CIDU that I’m too lazy to look up.”
I gave in and looked it up! Alicia Keys had a song “Girl on Fire”. And the lookup also finds a few parodies, under titles like “This girl is on Pfizer,” that predate this cartoon. Indeed it seems to be a fast-moving meme, with hashtags on Twitter and TikTok.
The list of manufacturers sounds like the choices for Covid vaccine, though I guess they would be similar for Flu. The song parody with available lyrics certainly made it Covid, and it’s tempting to suppose that was Hilburn’s idea at first which then got softened, as it were. (The actual song dates from 2012)
Thanks to Andréa for this subtle groaner:
Sources say that either the exclamation “Great Scott” is not attached to any particular person with that name; or else may be associated with Sir Walter Scott, or with U.S. General Winfield Scott. But here, with the talk of Antarctica and the South Pole, surely they intend some kind of glance at famous and unfortunate polar explorer Robert F Scott?
And another from Andréa, who calls this “Barely an oy”. Also fodder for you dialectologists out there.
Comics I Don't Understand 