Toasts
Toasts
[There are two rows of 4 panels each. Each panel shows a different person offering a toast. Each one has some kind of drink in one hand which they hold up.]
[First row panels:] [Cueball holding up a wine glass to the right:] Cueball: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!
[Blondie holding up a regular glass to the left:] Blondie: Pseudopods for my real friends and real pods for my pseudo-friends!
[Megan holding up a drinks glass to the right:] Megan: Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends.
[A "brunette" woman (i.e. similar hair but less dark than Megan) holding up a normal glass with a small umbrella in it to the right:] Brunette woman: Loosestrife for my real friends and real strife for my loose friends!
[Second row panels:] [Hairbun holding up a wine glass to the left:] Hairbun: Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!
[White Hat holding up a regular glass to the right:] White Hat: Single-payer for my real friends and RealPlayer for my single friends.
[Ponytail holding up a regular glass to the right:] Ponytail: Tumbleweeds for my real friends and real weed for my Tumblr friends!
[Beret Guy holding up a wine glass to the left:] Beret Guy: Fauxhawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!

A toast is a ritual in which a drink is taken as an expression of honor or goodwill. The term may be applied to the person or thing so honored, the drink taken, or the verbal expression accompanying the drink. Thus, a person could be "the toast of the evening," for whom someone "proposes a toast" to congratulate and for whom a third person "toasts" in agreement.
The comic is based on the quote Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends which, though often attributed to the painter Francis Bacon or to Tom Waits , is a toast dating back to at least the nineteenth century. It is also the entire title of a song , the ninth track on From  Under the Cork Tree , a 2005 album by Fall Out Boy .
The comic plays on a permutation structure between two words (a type of chiasmus ), yielding puns with various effects.  In this comic eight persons drink a toast for their "real friends" and then for some other type of "friends". For the real friend they wish them to have one specific thing. This something is a word (X-Y) that can be split up in two meanings (X and Y), where one of them are then put in front the word friend, to explain what type of friends they are now toasting (often a bad/false type of friend) and then these friends get a wish for having what the word that are left of the original word means: "X-Y for my real friends and real Y for my X friends"
The first example is a typical toast, in Champagne, where this word can be split in the two phonetically similar words Sham and Pain, and the sham friends then get pain. Below all examples (including the ninth from the title text) are listed with explanation for all words. In some cases the word may actually refer to a drink (like the first with champagne), so that the first word is not something wished for the real friends, but the drink that is in the glass (these have been mentioned below). But for other toasts there is no such drink in existence, and the first word is the thing the toaster wishes for the real friends.
[There are two rows of 4 panels each. Each panel shows a different person offering a toast. Each one has some kind of drink in one hand which they hold up.]
[First row panels:] [Cueball holding up a wine glass to the right:] Cueball: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!
[Blondie holding up a regular glass to the left:] Blondie: Pseudopods for my real friends and real pods for my pseudo-friends!
[Megan holding up a drinks glass to the right:] Megan: Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends.
[A "brunette" woman (i.e. similar hair but less dark than Megan) holding up a normal glass with a small umbrella in it to the right:] Brunette woman: Loosestrife for my real friends and real strife for my loose friends!
[Second row panels:] [Hairbun holding up a wine glass to the left:] Hairbun: Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!
[White Hat holding up a regular glass to the right:] White Hat: Single-payer for my real friends and RealPlayer for my single friends.
[Ponytail holding up a regular glass to the right:] Ponytail: Tumbleweeds for my real friends and real weed for my Tumblr friends!
[Beret Guy holding up a wine glass to the left:] Beret Guy: Fauxhawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!
