Dictionary

Tom and Jerryish en · ADJ

Etymology

From Tom and Jerry + -ish.

Meanings

1. Resembling or characteristic of the American animated media franchise Tom and Jerry.
   • Ugly Bucket play it like a Hanna Barbera cartoon, with lots of slapstick, mildly bad taste humour and some of the most perfect, Tom and Jerryish facial acting you’ll see on the Fringe. 2022 August 29, David Pollock, “[Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre reviews: Good Grief | Candy | I Was Naked, Smelling of Rain] Good Grief ****”, in The Scotsman, archived from the original on 29 Aug 2022:
   • There’s almost something of a Tom and Jerryish stretch about a damsel holding on to the straps of Salman Khan’s hawaii chappals on the edge of a snow-covered cliff and he pulling her up easily with a supermannish sweep. 2012 September 2, “Being tiger”, in The Pioneer:
   • There cannot be too many xylophone concertos; that by the Japanese composer Toshirô Mayuzumi dates from 1965, and although no masterpiece, it has its entertaining moments, if inevitably it sounds a bit ‘Tom and Jerryish’ at times. 2002, Ivan March, Edward Greenfield, Robert Layton, “[Concerts of Orchestral Concertante Music] Other Concerts”, in The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs and DVDs Yearbook 2002/3, Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 331, column 1:
   • Whatever games he got up to, whatever Tom and Jerryish behaviour he indulged in, a young man’s evening always ended up with a row at the Criterion Bar, and “You can have no idea how unutterably tired one can become of the walk from Piccadilly Circus to the Vine Street Police Court.” 2011, Molly Carr, “On Being in the Criterion Bar”, in In Search of Dr Watson, Andrews UK Limited, →ISBN:
   • Post-Stalinist successes included the series Just You Wait!, a Tom and Jerryish effort featuring Little Rabbit, with Wolf, a hooligan and social nuisance, as the opposing baddie. 2007, Catriona Kelly, “In Their Own Time”, in Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991, Yale University Press, →ISBN, part III (‘Family Children’), page 479:
   • Tom and Jerryish / WIDGETT, a 15-month-old lilac burmese cat which lives in the north-east of England, ended up in a vet’s surgery when he took on one mouse too many in his back yard. The mouse somehow got on its back and bit Widgett badly on the neck, drawing blood. 1998 August 22, David Gee, “Diary”, in The Press, page 2:
   • But Steven Spielberg would never have consented to the riotous initiation of tailspinning, neck-twisting and pulverizing that CJ7 is subjected to, which is more suggestive of soft-core “Tom and Jerry”-ish sadism than Industrial Light & Magic whimsy. 2008 March 7, Jan Stuart, “‘CJ7’: Hong Kong echoes of ‘E.T.’”, in Newsday, volume 68, number 186, page B15:
   • In Crow the extremes of violence come to seem like the action in comic books, Tom and Jerryish, not credible and not quite funny. 1998, Michael Schmidt, “Candours”, in Lives of the Poets, BCA by arrangement with Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page 792:
   • Some of the songs, Lionel told Mark Steyn, were composed in a Tom And Jerryish way, with the rhythm suggested by the character’s walk. 2011, David Stafford, Caroline Stafford, chapter 8, in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’ Be: The Lionel Bart Story, Omnibus Press, →ISBN, page 99:
   • Now we are all running up and guess who’s running down. About 300 muscle bound, black tee shirt wearing, torch carrying doorman. Now I think to meself that this is getting very Tom and Jerryish. 1993, “The Amazing Adventures of Arthur Trip”, in Blaze, number 15, page 11, column 3:

Forms