Obligatory pedantic note: I still don’t like to see “invite” as a noun in place of “invitation”!
Betty’s son asks a question, and sure enough farther down my GoComics feed, I find the answer in Big Nate: First Class!
We almost put this Other Coast in tomorrow’s Mothers’ Day collection.
This one probably was the basis for the “word play in general” category.
Sent in by >>Boy-see Ed<<, who says “This one suits me to a tea”.
This next one depends on remembering when Lars von Trier and friends declared the Dogme 95 principles for filmmaking. (And probably does not require remembering the Kevin Smith film Dogma.)
With this December 2011 Brevity, we’re getting a bit into OYs.
And we interrupt our parade of Oldies to drop in a Duffy Lug Nuts on the same theme from current GoComics publication:
A couple OYs from Andréa:
P.S. And then I saw this one on Facebook:
I had to give it a minute to hit.
And in Chicago we call it “wha’s this here sauce?”.
Some of these are somewhat CIDU for me, actually. I’m just guessing “Frankenstein’s Castle” is a thing, and “Vampire Bass” draws a blank.
Since we seem to have a subcategory under Oy for “Literalizing an Idiom”, might as well provide it some examples!
When he dons it, is it part of his gay apparel?
Should this strip have appeared on a Throwback Thursday?
(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.
But it seems to be offering a moment of inspiration, when he discovers … his own name? (Or his pretend / pun name, no difference.)
It finally turns into a sort of techno-era observational-humor consumer complaint about passwords and online support and automated voice response systems. Stuff we all like to complain about, fine.
But to get there we have to follow a confusing sequence of redefinitions of “cordless” and “wireless” – do these parachutes lack the strings/lines joining the canopy to the harness? Is that what makes them cordless? Oh, you mean automatic deployment of some sort so you don’t use a traditional manual “ripcord”. But the online bit (which is what “wireless” seems to mean here) is an utterly implausible development in the sport.
Y’know, it’s almost there! But there’s nothing at all in the scene to relate to the baseball meaning of bunt, let alone the more specialized sacrifice bunt.
Home, sweet home
An Oy from Andréa:
Oy by virtue of wordplay, broadly speaking
At Arnold Zwicky’s Blog he analyzes this and discusses previous comics uses of the same pun.
A trio-oy from Andréa:
But I have told my cats they are not truly brother and sisters. Even though I need to say “Now be nicer to your little sister!”
In the lane of “I guess I get the intended joke point, but the execution is unsuccessful” we have this “powdery math” example from zbicyclist. “I’m lost here. He’s eating one donut, and has another on his plate. That’s two donuts. So how is it 50% less sugar than two donuts?” I guess the *one* donut Leroy is waving around does have 50% less sugar than the two he has altogether, since it’s 50% less donut.
I thought at first it was going to be the funnish kind of percentage mistake coming from inconsistent base. We’re going to increase your supply of widgets by 10%. But now you have too many, so we’ll reduce your supply by 10%. That should put you back where you started …. eh?
The main-punch of this charming joke is clear enough — curiosity may be fatal to cats (as in the common saying) but not to these patients. But what is it that the vet has diagnosed as a case of curiosity? And is it supposed to be clear why he speaks in the singular, and which one of the dogs is the patient?
I dunno, maybe the problem is that the top section looks like a “throwaway panel” but actually it’s essential that it appear right above the scene with the cars. Because it’s the upper-storey window and sign for the gym? But we still have to pin down the connection between weight-lifting and how that extra car got where it is.
If your thing is to visually or linguistically play off some familiar phrase or saying that almost everybody surely knows …. there’s going to be trouble when you use some that nobody knows. (All right, I know about “disruptor”. But that’s about it.)
Okay, let the anatomists explain from the configuration of fingers (and additional hand in panel 2) that the hand doing the artwork in panels 2 and 3 has to be Nancy’s. Even so, what does it get her? And if it could possibly be Fritzi’s own, does that mean her panel 1 nag about “the expression on my face” was just a fancy prank setup?
Comics I Don't Understand 