Today’s Zippy returns to the topic of facial expression and gesture in Dingburg:
Five stances (or gestures), each with an absurdly specific meaning (some of which suggest, in snowclonish way, proverbs or quotations). Plus an appearance of Lithuanians.
I was pointed to a classic gay comic by the bibliography in the entertaining and informative The Dick Book: Tuning Your Favorite Body Part (Micha Schulze & Christian Scheuss, Bruno Gmünder 2013, translation of Das Schwanzbuch. Tuning für dein bestes Stück 2008): Ralf König’s The Killer Condom (2009 Ignite! Entertainment (rev. ed.); 1992 The Killer Condom Catalan Communications, translation from German by Jim Steakley of 1988 Kondom des Grauens [‘Condom of Horror’] Edition Kunst der Comics/Ralf König). Aside from the pleasures of the story, there’s some snowclonish interest.
Today’s Zippy:
The strip is a lead-in to a pun so dreadful — the Holy Grill for the Holy Grail — that it’s wonderful. Then there’s the taco sauce theme and the snowlone let the X commence in the title.
Passed on by Gary Robert Kelly on Facebook this morning:
Bad Taxidermy Photos Are The Potato Jesus Painting Of The Animal World (by Josh Kurp, 11/14/12) [note the snowclone X is the Y of Z (here)]
Disfigured alive animals, not so funny. Disfigured dead animals, hi-larious. Now before calling me a serial killer (that’s only half true), know that I’m referring to animals that have been taxidermied, specifically animals that have been taxidermied terribly …
Thanks to a tip from Bobby Big Wheel, we were led on a path filled with cross-eyed cats, derpy-looking dogs, and whatever the hell happened to the poor guy you see above.
(In defense of the polar bear: his teeth are perfect. Reference here to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”: I saw a werewolf drinkin’ a pina colada at Trader Vic’s / And his hair was perfect.)
It’s derpy.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Keeping up the paranoid sense of threat in the world of grammar, style, and usage, and combining errorism as a play on terrorism with the snowclonelet composite X police, in this case the very common grammar police (most recent posting here).
More adventures on the comics pages, this time in Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia, from the 2010 retrospective on 30 years of the strip, The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (with pointed commentary by Hollander on the already pointed cartoons).
From Jules Feiffer’s foreward:
For thirty years, long before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, my friend Nicole Hollander has been one of our nations’s leading satirists. Than mean that she is in the business of telling the truth and making it funny. She is right about almost anything. And because she is right, and she is funny, she has no power whatsoever.
Two pun cartoons this morning: a Bizarro Sunday Punnies collection, and a Zippy with a surprise in the last panel:
From tv reruns:
What part of “stop the car” don’t you understand? (Bones)
What part of stay don’t you understand? (NCIS)
What part of “desk work” don’t you understand? (NCIS)
What part of “Level 5 sorceress” don’t you understand? (NCIS)
The first three are sarcastic, using the snowclone template “What part of X don’t you understand?” (where X is a linguistic expression), conveying that the meaning of X should be obvious to anyone, despite the fact that the addressee has apparently not understood it. The fourth uses the formula, but now with reference to an X whose meaning can’t be expected to be generally known, so that the question comes close to being a straightforward information question (though with a somewhat snarky tone attributable to the snowclone).
In a final development, the formula gets used for literal questions about some topic X, as in
What part of beer don’t you understand?
on the Real Beer site, which offers information about beers, brewing, and related topics. (Similarly on a BMW parts site.)
Some more examples, and some reflections on the model for the snowclone, “What part of No don’t you understand?”
Today’s Zippy:
A startling example of the snowclone The New Y (first discussed on Language Log in 2004, here; entered in the snowclone database in 2007, here; and treated many times on LLog over the years). I long ago stopped collecting examples — there are far too many of them — but every once in a while I come across a striking instance, like “Morbid is the new cute”.
