Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 25, 2016

I thought I noticed an improvement in the art work.

Pears Before Swine?

Twelve angry fruits.

Pig is ’bosc’ing in reflected glory

Could a voyeur get a jury of his peers?Could a fisherman get a jury of his piers?

Even they’re pears, he’s still claimed Innocent.

Rat would draft a proposal to be tried by a jury of his beers.

He’d like to take it all the way to the Supreme Quart.

Or a urologist… oh, never mind….

Let the puns Comice.

And speaking of peers… consider the puns of Piers Anthony. He’s written books with pun-like titles such as Centaur Aisle, Crewel Lye, Board Stiff, Air Apparent, and so on… and on… and on, ad nauseam. If it’s possible to create a scale of punnery from elegant at one end to Stoop Id (See what I did there?) on the other, Anthony’s are among the worst of the worst. I’d argue that the ones usually appearing in this space are almost as bad. A great pun, a truly elegant one, preserves the logic and sense of meaning of two different terms in a single expression. One of the most elegant puns is from Jesus, who referred to Herod as “that fox” which scholars tell us is (in Hebrew, or was it Aramaic?) a pun on the sound of the NAME Herod and the NOUN that meant “fox”. So he has it both ways… referring to the king by name in one sense and calling him a name in another. A lousy pun is simply substituting a sound alike word for another and losing one (or both!) actual common sense meanings. Pig’s “pun” above might more charitably be called a rebus, the use of pictures to represent sounds. My point is that ANY CHILD COULD CREATE “PUNS” OF THIS KIND. (No birdy aviary soar any wing to eagle it. Voila! Five bird puns in one phrase!) Sometimes the puns in this strip are funny because of how elaborately tortured is the phrasing that is required to execute them. But too often they are just stupid (arising from some stoop’s id) and meaningless. Sometimes even that works, as in today’s strip in which the very stupidity is the whole point, self deprecatingly so. And maybe the entire corpus of punnery over the months/years of this strip function as one looooonnnngggg and elaborate joke. But the individual strips, in isolation, just seem… lazy, phoned-in, of the even-a-child-could-do-better variety. There, I’ve said my peace (!!!!).

Pig with a tie!

This cartoon has been up for several hours, & I’m the first one to say that Pig’s attorney must be “PEAR-y Mason”?!?

D’Anjou think you’re a pun artist?

Who’s the guest artist?

The webpage opened up and I looked and said to myself, “Looks like Pastis got a cramp in his hand today.” LOL

And Pig’s all smudged from doing the artwork, just like Charlie Brown is when writing a letter

If he wants to go for the play on words, pee-ers would be a much closer match. But, the artwork would be a problem.

Actually, juries never find defendants “innocent”. It’s either “guilty” or “not guilty”. “Not Guilty” does not mean “Innocent”, it means “not enough evidence to convict”

Is Pig molting?..or is that a hot spot?..or proud flesh?..get some wonder dust rite away.

Joan of Arc — jury of her pyres?

You don’t have to work on your drawing, Steve. Just cgange the punch line to " a jury of his potatoes." -Freedom Fighter

Next will we see a jury of his piers?

peer and pear don’t even sound alike.

Meh… I have seen better puns.

Tie comes off as soon as the verdict’s in.

My neighbor next door heard my groan

Will Cartoon-Boy be squeezed out of the comics to make way for the new hit strip by Pig?“This website’s not big enough for both of us, Bacon-Boy! Draw!”

Good thing they weren’t trying rat

As regards divine punnery, the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) is heavily freighted with it. It was mostly a symbolic literary device, but doubtless carried some of the humor of the “aha, I get it” variety for the hearers or readers. The name Adam, for example references several sound-alike words that can mean “a” man, “the” man, humankind, or earth/clay… from which Adam is said to be made. There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of such double meaning words in the Bible. The Herod/Fox and Peter/Rock examples have been mentioned. And, though I don’t know if ancient syntax makes this possible, I’ve always imagined a pause in Jesus’ call to certain disciples to leave their nets and boats, namely, “Follow me and I shall make you fishers… of men.” I imagine the individuals to think “Whah tha… ?” and later to realize, “Oh, I get it.”

Pear-secution?

Rat only says that because he thinks he actually would stand a chance of getting fans for his strips if he only had to compete with Pig.

Spare the pears.

The title of many classic Warner Bros cartoons contained great puns.