Datoro!

Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).

Joe Dator’s goldfish bar snacks. It’s a fish! It’s a cracker! And it’s an implicit pun (phonologically perfect), goldfish punning on Goldfish (neither name used, and only the fish depicted):

(#1) Note the bowl of goldfish on the bar (we know they are goldfish because they are drawn in color, in an otherwise b&w cartoon); Dator’s twist on the situation is that instead of offering a goldfish as a simple snack, the bartender is using it as a garnish in the cat’s martini in place of the customary lemon peel

This would be a much simpler, though still enjoyable, cartoon if the barkeep just used any small fish in place of the lemon twist, since the appetite of real cats is for fish in general; little carp are in no way special. (Admittedly, real cats do not sit on barstools and order martinis.) And then the bowl of goldfish on the bar would be dispensable; who cares where the barkeep gets his fish?

But no, Dator has gone for something much more complex, an implicit pun that requires that you know about the snack crackers with the brand name Goldfish®:

(#2) Goldfish crackers

And that you know that they were once a common bar snack; on that point, contemplate this piece from the TastingTable site, “Why Julia Child Loved To Serve Goldfish Crackers With Cocktails”, by Autumn Swiers on 1/5/24:

(#3)  Martini (with twist), Julia Child, and a pile of Goldfish

At one time, Goldfish crackers weren’t out of place at the bar. Before the Goldfish marketing campaign redirected its sights toward a child audience in the 1990s, those orange crackers were a common bar snack — and Julia Child herself was all about it.

Not the first time that a cartoon has turned on Goldfish as bar food; from my 8/8/23 posting “Barthropods seeking silverfish”:

(#4) A complex Wayno / Piraro Bizarro in which two centipedes look for bar snacks

First bit of language play: the portmanteau barthropod = bar + arthropod, centipedes being arthropods … Then there’s a more subtle bit of language play in silverfish serving as bar snacks in a world in which centipedes drink in bars — given that Goldfish crackers (gold fish, silver fish, bring out the bronze) are often served as bar snacks in the real world.

A lot of the delight — and also the difficulty — of Dator‘s cartoon is that it’s wordless, conveying the play on goldfish for Goldfish entirely visually. Plus of course the absurdity of the Cat in a Bar joke (a nice twist on the usual Dog in a Bar formula).

Tom Toro’s corn on the cod. It’s a fish! It’s a grain! And it’s an explicit pun (phonologically imperfect), cod punning on cob:

(#5) The fish name cod is a recurring pun word (phonologically imperfect, but probably more entertaining for that), on models like God, cog, code, and card

Toro brings us the pun cob in an idiom; from NOAD:

phrase corn on the cob: corn when cooked and eaten straight from the cob; an ear of corn.

I was a bit surprised that corn on the cod hasn’t been worked into a joke cartoon more often; maybe it takes a particular sort of imagination to combine the fish and the grain. But here’s one other way of putting them together:

(#6) An Etsy note cod [groan] by CapeCard

Final note. My apologies to JD and TT for portmanteauing their family names into Datoro (with its unfortunate echo of the poisonous, but beautiful, plant datura, plus Star Trek‘s Data and of course the bullring). But there they were, together in the July 22nd New Yorker, with related cartoons — the goddess Fortuna’s gift to the blogger.