Today’s Rhymes With Orange combines two cartoon memes, Psychiatrist and Elephant in the Room:
(#1)
Not the first time this combination has been drawn.
[Comedic snowclonic digression. A dreadful knee-slapper from the vaudeville stage.
Mr. Bones: My posting really puts the elephant in therapy!
Interloculator: Bones, you put the penis in happiness, but there’s no elephant in therapy.
Mr. Bones: Sure there is — it’s just that nobody’s willing to acknowledge it.
On the snowclone, in Language Log postings:
GP, 1/25/04: When did you first hear this pattern?
ML, 3/19/04: Putting the X in Y
ML, 10/2/11: Putting the X in AXB ]
As for #1, see my 12/29/17 posting “George Booth at 90: elephants and holidays” on the idiom the elephant in the room and on the cartoon meme, with in #8 there this Bizarro featuring an elephant in therapy:
(#2)
And this Leo Cullum cartoon:
(#3)
Just for fun, one more Elephant in the Room cartoon, without the Psychiatrist linkage: by J.B. Handelsman in the New Yorker:
(#4)
(The contrast between the gray solidity of the elephant and the cartoon-sketchiness of the couple is especially nice: the elephant is more real than the couple who don’t acknowledge its existence.)
On Handelsman, very briefly from Wikipedia:
J.B. Handelsman (February 5, 1922 – June 20, 2007) was a New York-born cartoonist and illustrator whose work appeared for decades in The New Yorker, Punch, Playboy, and other United States and British publications.
And from Nancy Franklin’s 7/2/07 obit for Handelsman in the New Yorker:
He wasn’t a polemicist, but his work was concerned with politics and history and the range of our folly, from mere foibles to gross inhumanity. (…) He saw not just the passing parade — though he did keep a sharp eye on that, believing, as he did, that cartooning was a form of journalism — but the deep, timeless politics that color, if not define, human relations (think bosses and secretaries, generals and underlings, senators and constituents, wives and husbands, judges and defendants.
Finally, a recognition of another elephant cartoon meme, Elephant Memory (based on the saying “An elephant never forgets”), which has come up several times on this blog, in particular in my 6/19/13 posting “Arnie Levin” (about the cartoonist); #1 there:
(#5)
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