The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England

(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest) The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it): Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum On to the four contributions. First thing. The genre of outrageous elaborate set-ups, leading to (surprise) payoff puns based on formulaic expressions — in this case, to if at first you don’t suck seed, try rye again…