Sunday, August 22, 2010

Will No One Rid Me of This Abominable Pun?

Where did I get this terrible pun?


ABOMINABLE




NOBLE

It helps if you say the words slowly. And think of the two images as a comic, representing two sequential moments in time.

I know I didn't get it from Mike. I've had this pun in my head since elementary school.

Maybe I got it from The Hodgepodge Book? Somehow, I don't think so.

I think that if I saw the original illustrations, I'd recognize them. But where?

10 comments:

  1. A bomb in a bull. Oy.

    (Incidentally, I was a little confused about the identity of the
    animal at first. A nose-ring might help its legibility as "bull"
    rather than "earless cow.")

    And no, you didn't get that one from me!

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  2. AWFUL, but in the best possible way. I got "Abominable" pretty quickly, and that helped me figure out "Noble," which was harder. (There was no bull in the drawing, you see.)

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  3. I just found this page by searching for the key words abominable and noble, because I had the same question: where have I seen this before? Did you ever figure out the answer? I think it may have been an old lithograph reprinted in a Martin Gardner book, but I'm not sure.

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  4. Same, may be different book but the one I saw with this but slightly different also had a riddle about Harry and two barbers, some kind of "I swallowed my toothbrush" and "what's a tarantula look like" things... a bunch of stuff. Wish I could find it.

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  5. I recall this graphic pun from a book of cartoons and humor in the early to mid-1970's. I don't believe it was the Hodgepodge book which seems to have a later copyright date.

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  6. I too remember seeing this in a paperback book in the 1970s. The book included various puzzles and brain teasers.

    One showed a boy looking at a truck in front of an overpass that was a fraction of an inch too low for the truck to pass. It said that the boy told the truck driver how to pass the overpass, and that it just took a few minutes and no great effort. The answer was to deflate the tires a bit.

    Another was a story about an inventor who told the king that he'd created a substance that would dissolve anything, and that he had it in the bottle he was holding. The king had the guy put in prison for lying; why? (It should have melted the bottle.)

    I think the same book also had various match-stick puzzles, where you had to rearrange the sticks to form different shapes.

    The "abominable" picture showed a bull who'd just eaten the contents of a box marked with danger/explosive symbols on it. The "noble" picture resembled the one from this article.

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  7. Found it: Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers by Martin Gardener.

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  8. Excellent, thank you! I also had the book as a kid, forgot the title, and was haunted by this pun. Finally the case is cracked. Now, if I could only find the graphic...

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  9. I read that book as a kid too. The Hodgepodge Book does come to mind as a possible candidate.

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  10. Thank you, Anon from June 20, 2018! - I ended up here by searching "abominable" and "noble", looking for the book title. It absolutely was Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers by Martin Gardener. I had that book in the '70s.

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