Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, has come up with one of his most tortured puns.
Mano Singham
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Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, has come up with one of his most tortured puns.
I’ve learned with these Sunday strips to stop after the third panel and see if I can figure out the pun. This time, I was able to. For everyone else who figured it out, we are the champions.
@brucegee1962, maybe Pig and Quincy should listen to that, to boost their confidence.
I’m not always able to guess the puns, but I have a fairly good track record and this one felt easy to me.
I wonder if the timing of the cartoon was intentional. Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. June 5 is the 40th anniversary of the first recorded patients with HIV/AIDS.
I must be stupid because I don’t get it. I know how to pronounce “oui”; it’s the “‘rah’ Q” that doesn’t ring any bells.
@billseymour — say it out loud.
@5- Say it out loud while stomping on the ground twice, and then clapping once.
billseymour, I don’t get it either.
What’s ‘RAH’ Q supposed to mean?
(Surely not ‘thank you’! That’s nowhere near. ‘Wrack you’ doesn’t make sense, though)
PS re “say it out loud” — anything I can say out loud I can think silently.
So that makes zero difference.
(nor do I see how somatisation helps)
For those who don’t get it, take a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJYN-eG1zk&ab_channel=QueenOfficial
kestrel, you’re suggesting it’s supposed to be ‘rock you’?
Doesn’t work for me; ‘rah’ sounds nothing like ‘roh’, and who the hell says ‘rock you’ to someone?
Ah well. Perhaps wrack is right, given it’s supposed to be a tortured pun.
For those who do not get the reference to the song by Queen that is a staple that is blared over the loudspeakers at sports events and basketball games especially to pump up the home fans to cheer louder, the words are “We will, we will, rock you!”
Must be a USA thing, like ‘las vegas’ being pronounced ‘los vegas’.
@ 14 Morales
Queen are English you doofus. 🙂
When you’re belting out “rock you” in a stadium, it sounds more like rah Q than when spoken. Look at kestrel’s link.
Silentbob:
I did, to make sure since kestrel only indicated it was a Queen song while providing only a naked link, which is how I know that particular video clip is not set in a stadium.
More to the point, no, it does not sound like rah Q when sung. Not to me, anyway.
Most to the point, you’re suggesting that unless one knows a priori what the reference is supposed to be, one won’t get it — after all, the characters are speaking, not singing in a stadium.
(So, you offer a most feeble rationalisation, one which I doubt you yourself believe)
Gosh, the official video (thanks to #10 Kestrel for the link) sure demonstrates that these guys from Britain were really good at singing using the American language. I wonder how they learned to pronounce American so well? It’s almost as if USA-speak were their native language. I wonder if a lot of UK people are bilingual, able to speak both American and also their native language, whatever they call it in that country that is east of Wales and south of Scotland?
When it comes to language, though, all I know as an American is that: We Are The Champions.
I think that’s like French for being the mushroom people, perhaps?
John, I can’t help but think that if you had tried it, you’d have figured it out. The sounds of ‘rah q’ and ‘rock you’ are not identical, but the difference is not insurmountable.
You’re clearly referring to the Brittonic areas in Britannia, as it was called by the ancient Romans.
For a while, that region was known to them as Anglo-Saxonia, although that is actually an Americanized name that was coined much later by an influential group of revisionist historians. In fact, the real name was unpronounceable even in their own native tongue. Their custom was instead to convey this knowledge to each other by slapping themselves in the face several times.
More recently, they decided to name the place Brexit, for reasons that I can’t even begin to comprehend. For one thing, there are the usual translation issues, and of course, very little attention is usually paid to such an insignificant island by the international press….
Anyway, the language in its current form is called Brexitese (with four and a half syllables, not three as you might expect).
In my admittedly provincial american dialect derived from the Midwest and the south, the “rah” and the “ro” in rock are pronounced virtually identically. The rah being from the traditional American footballese chant of “rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah” which I learned from Bugs Bunny and Andy Hardy.
Phonetically, using “roh” would indicate a pronunciation similar to Rho or row, row, row your boat
@18 -- so Brexitese is linguistically related to the continental dialect of Gaulicenbutter?
It took me a bit to figure out as well, but then I remembered that for some in the US, “Kamela” is pronounced like “Comma”. If you then read the last bit in the tempo of the song you get it.
“More recently, they decided to name the place Brexit, for reasons that I can’t even begin to comprehend. ”
They don’t comprehend it any better.
Bruce @#16
It long been common for pop and rock musicians singing in English to adopt American pronunciations. For example, listen to the Beatles singing Can’t but me love. They pronounce it the American way of ‘cant’ and not ‘cahnt’ to rhyme with ‘Kant’.
It has been suggested that we should consider this kind of music to have its own accent that is independent of nationality.
It’s a pun. It doesn’t have to be phonetically identical to the words it’s playing on.
Tabby, it doesn’t half two, but the closer, the better.
Mano the Beatles came from Liverpool in the north of England and in the north ‘can’t’ is pronounced ‘cant’, all vowels are short compared to in the south. My family complain I have a northern accent as my vowels have shortened over the years I’ve lived in the north, mind they’ve moved further south and their vowels have lengthened so the difference is obvious.