Several OYs from Andréa who says “Today must be Pun Day, rather than Labor Day . . . altho some of these puns could be considered quite labored . . .”.
Pedants / experts, have at it!
And another batch stamped “From Andréa” :
Thanks to Targuman for this homonym-based OY. And for anyone who might not catch the almost-quotation, he offers these tips: See Mark 6:36 // Matt. 16:26.
The squirrel gives one popular musical association to this city. But some of us would go for “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again!”.
Hmmm …
Panel four is definitely an OY (and the raccoon agrees).
Panel three is misinformation:
cross-species transmission is widespread.
See, for instance, here:
Panel two is borderline Op-Ed.
Panel one is just plain INSANE!
Thanks to Le Vieux Lapin for this one, which is some sort of word-play on language-related terms, so what is there not to oy?
For Argyle Sweater, one bad pun deserves another. The actual Pony Express is famous, but only existed for a short time, from from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861. Pricing didn’t help (The initial price was set at $5 per 1⁄2 ounce, then $2.50, and by July 1861 to $1. Normal mail service was $0.02 then.). The service continually lost money, and closed two days after the transcontinental telegraph connected Omaha with Sacramento.
Now we’ll segue into some that miss a bit. Kilby reminds us that Segway ceased production in June, 2020. One might ponder the various reasons why the Segway, introduced in 2001 to great fanfare, was a failure (and by the end, so out of mind it might have merited a geezer alert), while now e-bikes are flying off the shelves and electric scooters are commonly seen.
Well, there are some judgement calls here; let”s see if you agree. The “just ok” is enough to qualify it as a pun or Oy; but isn’t especially good, or enough to make it a funny Oy. However, the second shot, using the idea of “settling for [smthg]”, does make it work, and earns at least a chuckle. (No comment on the squirrel’s addition.)
For those of us who’ve served as executor of someone’s estate that wasn’t tied up very well, this will bring back painful memories. Painful OYs here.
And just when we were making plans to officially retire the Synchronicity category, this pair comes along within a week of each other with the same double pun. One factor is that this one was already published here, in last week’s OY list:
But this one is fresh:
I think this counts as a pun, even without doing a pun-joke.
The above sent by Andréa, who particularly notes Tom Waits getting mentioned, saying “Never thought I’d see HIM in a comic – made my day!”. And one of your editors had the pleasure of taking a couple classes from Professor Lance Rips, who liked to point out that his name constitutes a complete sentence.
Meant to post this earlier.
I learned the word prodigal in the context of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and thought it meant something like all the characteristics of the guy in the story – wandering, absent, returning after a long absence and acting all entitled, etc, all packaged in that one word. Only much later did I start seeing contexts that wouldn’t support all of that meaning, and learned the base sense spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant.
And then discovered that was what it meant in the Parable, too. But there had not been enough help from the context to make that choice clear! And this fits the philosopher’s point that, if your informant points to a rabbit and says gavagai, maybe they are telling you the word means rabbit — but maybe it means finger.
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.
From Andréa:
And which sort of meaning is invoked in “Check your privilege”?
… and “Along with 10 seconds before I got the loose parts ‘remorse'”:
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!”
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.
And then … you evolved?
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 