Amazing grays

Well, yeah, a spoiler. But the title should make you wonder how Stephan Pastis manages to weave together the whole setup / payoff formula pun in today’s (9/13) Pearls Before Swine strip. Here it comes: With a final critical review of the joke by the strip’s characters (customary in Pearls) From my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”: Outrageous elaborate set-up puns, based on formulaic expressions, are a genre in themselves, often treated as a kind of shaggy dog story (because of their complexity), though classic shaggy dog stories are anticlimactic, while these formula puns culminate in a complex pay-off [so I sometimes call them setup / payoff puns]. … Some comic strips specialize in them — notably Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis