Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “Forestry Union Negotiations” — plays with the homophones bear and bare in a fresh way, turning on the fact that Smokey the Bear (in those American public service ads for fire safety) is in fact a National Park Service ranger (who happens also to be a talking bear), and so would be required to dress in ranger garb:
(#1) The cartoon, in which Smokey appears on duty with his shovel for fighting fires, but regrettably bare: sans hat and (AmE) pants — also shirt and boots (regulation NPS wear is a gray shirt and green pants) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Now: a little background on Smokey, followed by some other playing with bear and bare. (By the way, though these are homophones for many English speakers, including most Americans, there are English varieties in which they are distinct — but quite close phonetically, so the word play still works just fine.)
Smokey and his slogan. In my 2/1/16 posting “Only YOU”, a section on Smokey the Bear and the poster slogan “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!”, plus its abbreviated form, as here:
(#2) Note that Smokey, though [chuckle] bare-chested, has his (personalized) ranger hat on and is also wearing blue jeans, so he satisfies the strictures set out in #1; and of course the shovel (a ranger never goes out without his shovel)
Bear Naked Granola. Food playfulness. From my 6/18/21 posting “Annals of commercial naming: Bear Naked Granola”:
Bear Naked Granola … is knee-deep in playfulness, starting with the pun on [the mildly lubricious idiom] bare naked, so that on the one side, you get a reference to bears, with their fondness for nuts and fruits and honey (all relevant to granola); while on the other side, you get bare naked, suggesting purity and simplicity [BNG isn’t sweetened; but bare naked could also suggest licentiousness, see below]. And you also get the pop-culture view of bears, as cute and entertaining.
(#3) From a 2020 animated ad, with a little extra raunchiness (what’s that bear doing with its hands?)
BNG is now my regular breakfast cereal (with some trail mix added for still more fruit and nuts, plus fresh berries — blueberries when I can get them — with plain yogurt and milk).
Bare Bear poets. Now for a bit that’s not for the sexually modest, since the photo in it has a fuzzy flaccid penis in it, off at an edge. But I view the photo as work of art and therefore exempt from the ban on the depiction of naughty bits on WordPress, so I reproduce it here as Richard Avedon originally published it. In any case, from my 9/22/16 posting “Bare Bear poets in their youth”:
In a full-page ad (p. 11) in the 9/26/16 New York Review of Books (for a photography exhibition at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco), celebrated fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon’s photo of poets Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, naked and in a hairy phase, in New York on December 30, 1963.
(#4) Ginsberg was clearly a bear (as a physical / identity type of gay man), but Orlovsky was, strictly speaking, bear-adjacent, more of an otter physically; but the bare bear joke is irresistible… The photo is often reproduced with Orlovsky’s dick cropped out (ouch), but I [don’t] do that here, because I think that misrepresents Avedon’s intentions, which were to portray a pair of lovers. Without the dick, what we’ve got is two bearded hippie buddies hangin’ out together. The dick is a sign of sexual connection — by no means the two men’s only connection (they were together for over 40 years, until Ginsberg died), but still an important point.
