In the July 2015 Funny Times (p. 10), a cartoon about cartoon conventions, which I’ll have to describe to you rather than show to you (for reasons I’ll explain).
It shows a man standing by a sidewalk in a park, offering balloons for sale. The placard next to him says
THOUGHT
BALLOONS
75¢
And the balloons are labeled:
NOW WHAT?
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
LIFE IS STRANGE
LIVE IN THE MOMENT
BE HAPPY!
each supplying a thought.
Funny Times reproduces cartoons and humor writing from other sources, some fairly recent, others going back a few years. The publication is not available on-line. But in principle with some work you could track down the originals; unfortunately, this is often very hard to manage.
For cartoons, the artists are not identified directly, though you can hope to recognize them from their signatures — but some signatures are obscure. As in this case: the signature looks like a scribble, though eventually I recognized it as belonging to veteran New Yorker cartoonist Mick Stevens (who’s appeared on this blog several times).
I couldn’t find an on-line copy of the Thought Balloon Man cartoon, and I wasn’t able to copy it from Funny Times, so for the moment you have to be content with the description above.
But I can offer some Stevens cartoons with thought balloons, and two others on linguistic topics.
With thought balloons: the invention of dental floss; intelligent extraterrestrials who check out the earth and speed away in astonishment; and Roget’s Brontosaurus (with a thought balloon and a linguistic joke):
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
Then two without thought balloons: on invention vs. discovery, and a play (almost wordless) on the formula “Does a bear shit in the woods?”, conveying ‘Yes’:
(#4)
(#5)
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