Protests against pre-shredded cheese in today’s Bizarro:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A punning play on the political slogan Make America Great Again.
Note red baseball caps on several of the protesters.
The source of the slogan, on the campaign trail in 2016:
(#2)
The slogan mostly appears on red baseball caps, but there are other possibilities: instead of the canonical red, the color might be black, white, or yellow, or in a few playful cases, pink or lavender; and instead of the canonical headgear, the slogan might be displayed on a button, flag, poster, or billboard.
The slogan has also be translated into other languages. A Chinese version:
(#3)
(I can’t vouch for the translation. For all I know, what it says is ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’.)
Most variants of the slogan take one of two forms:
(A) Make X great again
(B) Make America Y again
A wonderful exception is the attested:
Make baseball caps blank again
Within each set, the substitute, X or Y, is either a pun on the original — in #1, a perfect pun great / grate (both /gret/ in most varieties), but sometimes pretty distant, as with great / gay — or a simple, phonologically unrelated, substitution. In both cases, the substitutions are sometimes merely playful, sometimes pointed, often zany or nonsensical.
So now an inventory of some attested examples, with loosely labeled subcategorizations below the ones already mentioned.
MAKE X GREAT AGAIN
puns on America: Americanos [the style of coffee], Anime
simple substitution: Metallica, Radiohead, Canada
overlap portmanteau: Great Britain
MAKE AMERICA Y AGAIN
puns on great:
— V: skate, hate, rave, rake [rake a baseball field]
— Adj: gay, ape, gradient
— N: gait
simple substitution:
— V: read, drink, love, rock, funk, rock & roll
— Adj:
— — (from the original campaign speech) strong, proud, safe
— — (positive) decent, kind, smart, sane
— — (earnest) green, native, secular
— — (snarky) British [cf. the N Great Britain above]
— — (reclaiming the ideal past) white, straight, Christian
— — (out of control) violent, psycho, drunk
— N: Mexico, Yaoi [Japanese ‘boys’ love’ anime], dinner, covfefe [presumably ‘kerfuffle’], meme
A few visuals:
(#4)
(#5)
In the rainbow Pride flag
(#6)
Essentially Make America Great + Great Britain
(#7)
Slogan for Tennessee congressional candidate Rick Tyler; the reference is supposed to be to simpler, rural times
