Pearls Before Swine (11-21 strip). Is this the setup to an actual joke, or is it supposed to just look like one?
I think just meant to look like one. The real ones are usually painfully obvious.
He sometimes spends the entire strip setting up a bad pun. This time Rat got to him first.
I kind of suspect a play on ‘don’t shoot (choo) until you see the whites (whyte) of their eyes (ayes)’.
It’s part of a long-running joke about how much the characters hate doing those pun strips. They have happened often enough that Rat would be able to see them coming, so he stopped it first.
Yeah, that much is clear, but what the OP (and I) wondered was whether the one Rat stopped in today’s strip would/could have been developed into an actual pun, and if so, what. It’s like asking if Lewis Carroll had an answer to the “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” riddle.
Tengu, you may be onto something, but I can’t figure out how it would work.
On another comic strip issue, I wish Get Fuzzy would get off the goddamned British references. You’re in American newspapers: we don’t get it!
There is no actual joke to those. Nothing to “get”. They’re just existing movie titles with British placenames substituted for an original word. They may be as much football club references as placename references…but it’s just a word substitution either way.
ETA: And they’re supposed to be lame and not funny in themselves…Bucky is almost as stupid as Satchel, just in a different direction.
Is it sleep?
/Satchel
I want to be Rat when I grow up.
Sorted!
It was funny for about two strips. After two weeks, it’s just tiresome.
So, I’m bumping this thread because the treasury that contains Stephan Pastis’s commentary on the strip in question came out on Tuesday, and his comment for this strip says:
Tengu (now Kamino Neko) has been vindicated at long last.
Zombie vindication is the worst kind.
:eek:
Holy scrap. 2 years later, and I win! <_<
(I still have no idea how they’d have got there…I suspect neither did Pastis, and that’s why he decided to have Rat knock him senseless instead…)
I have no idea how the setup was supposed to be worked into that phrasing. I suspect Pastis didn’t either, hence Rat kicking his ass in the strip instead of carrying through with it.
On another board, someone had a reasonable speculation. I think it was something like pig saying “I told Mr. Choo not to vote until he saw how Mr. Whyte was going to vote. I said 'Don’t, Choo, ‘till you see Whyte and his ayes.’.” The details of making it work perfectly seem pretty hairy, though…