first published in The Australian 26/8/09
This one went with a letter in the Higher Ed section of the Oz yesterday. Just a little cartoon tip, the trick for getting away with a willy joke is to take it upmarket and toss in (so to speak) a bit of mathematics and replace “willy” with “phallus”. Those ancient Greeks and their phalluses…
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Hi Jon, congratulations! I never thought I’d see the day when Pythagoras’ Theorem was successfully reduced to a cock joke, but you appear to have succeded in delivering admirably…
–Christopher Neugebauer, BSc (Mathematics, CS)
Words are so powerful.
Luckily cartoons are there to balance the equation.
This is one of those glints of brilliance, I like to render down to, “Make ’em laught, them make ’em think.”
There is a complexity in this cartoon that defies an afternoon in a hammock with a Tasmanian Pinot.
Reminds me of a film I once saw entitled “Free Phallus!”
It was not about a young male prostitute who had hit rock bottom. It was a bout of the “willies” some censors had about a word.
It is an ever moving and changing word sea that society ships its meanings upon.
Whatever happened to ‘feck’? I find your work feckful, as the old Scots would have it, but feck got fecked up by some collateral damage in a etymological sex scandal.
It’s the next step up from phallus: to get the feck word in a cartoon in the Oz.
Look at your cartoon feet a gauntlet.