for Solar Eclipse Day, Sisyphus and drive-time DJs intersect in a Venn diagram, where they generate a wonderful even-handed pun:
(#1) The hinge is the ambiguous NP great classic rock; what Sisyphus and drive-time DJs share — what’s in the area in the diagram that represents the intersection of the categories in the two circles — is that they’re people who bring you the same great classic rock every night (but in two different senses of the great classic rock)
We understand what the categories are in a Venn diagram from the labels on the intersecting circles and on the areas of their intersection, which are meant to be informative (and clear in their reference). But of course the labels are expressions in some language, which means that ambiguous expressions can be exploited for a joke. As in #1.
(#1 came to me on Facebook from from pun enthusiast Susan Fischer, the syntactician and psycholinguist specializing in sign languages; the ultimate source is the vox + stix website, on which see below)
Venn diagrams. From NOAD:
noun Venn diagram: a diagram representing mathematical or logical sets pictorially as circles or closed curves within an enclosing rectangle (the universal set), common elements of the sets being represented by the areas of overlap among the circles.
Some history in my 4/11/17 posting “Guest morning name: Venn”, in a section on the Cambridge logician and philosopher John Venn, developer of the diagrams that have come to bear his name.
Venn diagrams can be used to represent a conceptual analysis of some domain; such analyses can be both thought-provoking and entertaining, as in an example from my 1/17/14 posting “Superhero comic tropes”:
From Tyler Schnoebelen in Facebook, this [3-circle] Venn Diagram of superhero comic tropes:
(#2) The superheroes are mostly (but not entirely) from animation; the entertainment value of the diagram comes from taking the relevant characteristics for the conceptual analysis to be: wearing underwear on the outside, having tragically dead parents, and wearing a cape
The categories in the conceptual analysis can be chosen because of the labels in use for them; the Venn diagram is then intended as a semantic analysis of the labels into meaning components — as in this analysis from my 9/17/11 posting “Venn diagramming for nerds”, with this this 3-circle Venn diagram:
(#3) The three circles stand for the three meaning components: they are the categories of intelligent people, socially inept people, and obsessed people; the areas of intersection are then categories of people labeled by AmE slang terms in the nerdy domain: dork, dweeb, geek, and nerd
You might reasonably protest that this is a clever but not particularly accurate analysis of slang terms, whose sociocultural meanings are famously tricky to describe.
Funny Venn diagrams. #2 and #3 are jokey in tone, but some Venn diagrams (especially the two-circle ones) are flat-out intended to be jokes. Mostly, the jokes turn on two very different categories that have some surprising characteristic in common. These are the graphical versions of riddles of the How are X and Y alike? / How is an X like a Y? variety: How is a raven like a writing desk?, asking for some characteristic ravens share with writing desks, asking what the intersection of the raven and writing desk categories have in it. As here (available on a number of “funny Venn diagrams” sites):
(#4) The intersection of the strippers category and the cat category: creatures that will sit on your lap but won’t let you touch them (for different real-world reasons)
More generally: the intersection of (grossly dissimilar) categories X and Y contains things that fall under a single description (but for different real-world reasons).
Venn puns. Finally, funny Venn diagrams where the intersection of (grossly dissimilar) categories X and Y contains things that fall under a single (but ambiguous) description (but in different senses). That’s where we came in, with #1, a lovely Venn pun: things that bring you the same great classic rock night after night, where great classsic rock has two very distinct senses, which I’ll call the Sisyphus reading vs. the DJ reading (Sisyphus and DJ for short):
adj. great: Sisyphus ‘very large and imposing’ vs. DJ ‘very good or satisfactory, excellent’
adj. classic: Sisyphus ‘classical, relating to ancient Greek or Latin culture’ vs. DJ ‘well-established and exemplary of its kind’
noun rock: Sisyphus ‘solid mineral material’ vs. DJ ‘rock music’
(held constant in the two readings: bringing you the same X night after night — while recognizing that the means of bringing and the nature of the recipient(s) will differ in the two contexts).
Bi-level vs. even-handed puns. Most of the (very many) puns I’ve discussed on this blog have been of the bi-level sort: there’s a model expression X and then (one level up, so to speak) there’s a pun expression Y on it. The two-level nature of imperfect puns is especially clear; in with fronds like these, who needs anemones?, we have a conventional formulaic expression, the saying with friends like these, who needs enemies? that’s clearly primary, that’s the model for the novel expression punning on it.
Venn diagrams have no levels; each intersecting circle is on a par with the others; the right-left ordering of the circles means nothing. So we’re invited to think of Venn puns as even-handed, not bi-level. Neither the Sisyphus reading nor the DJ reading of the great classic rock is primary; they just co-exist.
The source for #1. vox + stix isn’t a cartoon or joke site, but
an online cover band located (mostly) in NY, playing music people love, forgot they love, and don’t know they love yet. Our set list, unlike literally any other cover band in the history of the world, spans many genres and decades, such as classic rock, pop, 80s, 90s, and today’s music, whatever that’s called. (from their website)
So they do indeed bring you the same great classic rock night after night. And they’re playful.