Finbarr Saunders

Finbarr Saunders is a long-running comic strip in the British comic magazine "Viz".

The strip is about a boy (Finbarr Hawtrey Saunders) who is always overhearing ambiguous conversations, usually between his divorced mother and their neighbour, Mr. Gimlet, with whom she always eventually ends up having sex. For the majority of the strip, Finbarr does nothing but laugh at the double entendres he hears, making noises such as "Fnarr! Fnarr!", "Warf! Warf!", "Tsssk Tsssk", "Chortle Chortle" and "K-Woo! K-Woo!", until the end where he (usually) mistakes the sounds of his mother having sex for something much more innocuous.

A few examples of double entendres, all taken from issue 138 of "Viz":

*When talking of his wife's antique camera, a man says "I've spent many a hot afternoon with my face under her hood, flicking away at that button, trying to make those leathery old flaps open up."
*When talking of his picture printing apparatus he says "I've got a small Johnson, but it can enlarge to nigh on a foot when it is turned on in a darkened room"
*When demonstrating how easy it is to take off the lens he says "A few quick twists of the wrist and it comes off in a couple of seconds... Mind you I haven't had it off in ages, so it was very stiff this morning"
*When talking about taking pictures of people he passes on the street, he says "I often startle passers-by when I suddenly pull it out of my trousers and it goes off in their eyes."
*When describing the lamp in his darkroom he says "Mine's quite large and glows red at the top"

He is sometimes visited by his mother's Russian friend, Sergei. Unfortunately, Sergei's English is very bad, which results in his sentences being corrupted in often lewd ways (for instance, "Your mother wants me to fetch her aerosol" becomes "Your mother wants me to felch her arsehole"). He first appeared in 2002, having moved to the UK in order to improve his English. This was evidently unsuccessful - in early 2005 he appeared and claimed to have a "rock hard dick" which was "spunking now" (he actually meant that he had a "record deck" which was brand "spanking new").

Typically, the final frame of the cartoon features mother and friend going off to perform a sexual act. They even say what they are up to but this time Finbarr fails to laugh and comes up with an innocent explanation which he shares with the reader. For example, once Mr Gimlet is heard to say, "What a large crack, Mrs Saunders. Would you like me to fill it?" after a strip full of innuendo related to decoration and DIY. Finbarr deliberately takes it to mean that Mr Gimlet has found damage in the coving of his mother's bedroom, rather than the obvious sexual pun. If she has sex with Sergei, then his bad English is reversed and he utters seemingly polite sentences to describe his sex acts (such as asking Mrs Saunders if she likes the taste of his "cake" as she fellates him).

External links

* [http://www.viz.co.uk Viz Official Website]