CSotD: Funny triggers
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xkcd starts us off with a cartoon that is funny but that then sends me off on a tangent.
Obviously, what she proposes is not what anyone means by “putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” but I think that, if you squirted toothpaste out on the sink, you could probably get it back in the tube by holding the tube upward, squeezing out the air inside and then letting it vacuum up the spilt toothpaste.
But you’d only get a little bit at a time, and, given the cost of toothpaste, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
However — and granted this is already overthinking it — it’s still not my point, which is that I’m betting the expression arose back when toothpaste came in metal, not plastic, tubes. And if you think getting toothpaste back in a plastic tube is more effort than it’s worth, well . . .
. . . well, okay, you probably never thought that. But never mind, because I’ve got more quibbles.
For instance, this Bliss (AMC) is, at heart, just another “kids staring at phones” gag, which is on a par with “saggy jeans” gags, though I can remember that, when phones first became a thing, people would post videos of phone-gazers walking into stuff.
I’m sure people still do that from time to time, but I also think they’re learned to split their vision, similar to the way a marksman keeps both eyes open even though he’s only using one to sight down the rifle barrel.
Most of your vision is focused on the phone but some of it is looking at the ground in front of you. I think.
No matter, because what caught my semi-distracted eye was the sign, which is a take-off on lawn signs that say “Drive Like Your Child Lives Here.”
Which trigger this old editor because, while I agree with their sentiment, the damned signs should read “Drive As If Your Child Lived Here.”
It’s speculation against fact — your kid doesn’t live here — and so requires “lived,” not “lives.”
Drive as if I were — not “was” — a rich man, Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum.
And then here comes Lio (AMS) who thinks “fun” is an adjective, which it sorta kinda is, but, even if it were (speculation against fact), that’s not how degrees of fun are expressed.
Fun is a noun that can function as an adjective, but things are “more fun” not “funner,” to which I would add that something can be “so much fun” but can’t be “so fun.”
Grammar Girl agrees with me, and goes, reluctantly, into use of “fun” as an adjective, with “boring” and “yellow” as parallel examples.
Point being that things can be “more boring” but not “boringer” and “yellow” is a primary color, so either something is yellow or it isn’t.
It can’t be “more yellow,” though it might be a “brighter yellow” if you’re talking about light rather than pigment.
Something can be a darker brown because brown isn’t a primary color, so you’re really talking about the admixture of other colors which produce brown. Though not “tan” or “burnt sienna.”
Anyway, “funner” is not a word.
But that is one hell of a grasshopper.
In fact, it’s the grasshoppest.
Meanwhile, this New Yorker cartoon by Theresa Burns Parkhurst is funny except I didn’t laugh.
I got it: Guys don’t quite understand “Trouble Talk,” in which you are supposed to express sympathy by volunteering that you know how they feel because you’ve been through something similar.
Women mostly get it right, though I’ve heard them hijack the conversation, too, and turn their friend’s discussion of a problem into a discussion of theirs instead.
But there’s a bitter taste here that kept me from laughing and made me wonder, if she knew he’d do it, why she told him anything.
By contrast, Pat Byrnes goes straight at an egotistical bully, and I laughed rather than winced.
I think it’s the exaggeration.
Burns Parkhurst offers a gag that’s realistic, except that the woman says something she is too decent to say out loud, while Byrnes creates an absolute travesty of the boardroom sin in which the bigger ego seizes credit for something someone else said earlier.
Byrnes does well to make it a male-to-female interaction. It happens to guys, too, but women are the ones who have raised it as an issue, so the reader is better able to recognize the parody.
What’s interesting to me is that I see Byrnes’ cartoon as a joke about bullies, but Burns Parkhurst’s cartoon as a joke about men. I think she’d have needed multiple panels to make it a joke about a particular type of guy, while his exaggeration lets him make the more farcical point with a single image.
Anyway, the Burns/Byrnes factor offers a segue to talk about creative types with (nearly) the same last name, and Adam@Home (AMS) had an arc about his wife’s new book, and this episode totally cracked me up.
I know authors who look like themselves on their book jackets, but there are indeed Smolderers and Thoughtful Ones and it reminds me of the photographers who used to set up in the mall to do “glamour shots” in which they’d doll you up and take a picture that nobody would ever recognize.
And then there are those who have a “photo face” they snap into whenever a camera appears. Ann B. Davis looked exactly the same in every picture she ever took, whether as Schultzie on the Bob Cummings Show or as Alice 20 years later on the Brady Bunch.
These people must wear out bathroom mirrors the way tennis players wear out backboards.
This Pooch Cafe (AMS) is silly, but it reminds me of a biker buddy who started dating a very straight Jewish girl, and I mention her religion because her parents got one look at his long hair, tattoos and gang colors and suddenly she was off to a kibbutz in Israel.
She shocked’em, all right.
But I think he really loved her.
After she was gone, he drove by on his bike and heaved a brick through their picture window.
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