Today’s Rhymes With Orange, combining two familiar cartoon memes:
(#1) A compound, Desert Island + Grim Reaper
Also incorporating a joke formula, the Good News Bad News routine. The good news is verbalized in the cartoon, the bad news is implicit in the figure of the Grim Reaper.
As an extra, the boat that the Grim Reaper is steering towards the little island looks a lot like a gondola, so evoking Death in Venice and Charon the boatman of death, and possibly more indirectly, a Viking funeral boat with an animal-head prow.
Compound cartoon memes. Doubly memic cartoons are more common than you might imagine, possibly because cartoonists view them as an interesting challenge. The Psychiatrist meme seems to have a particular affinity for compounding; I’ve posted three on this blog already:
(#2) From my 5/1/16 posting “Between the desert and the crouch”, a Bizarro with Psychiatrist + Desert Crawl (plus self-referentiality)
(#3) From my 4/13/17 posting “Three more reapings”, #1 there, a Bizarro with Psychiatrist + Grim Reaper
(#4) From my 6/11/18 posting “In case of cartoons, see therapist”, #4 there, a Strange Brew cartoon by John Deering, with Psychiatrist + Desert Island
But Hilary Price is not the first to cross Desert Island with Grim Reaper. Harry Bliss, who’s done dozens of Grim Reapers, has been there, with an especially poignant strip:
(#5) The Reaper has scythed his only companion and is now truly alone in death (from the New Yorker‘s 2/5/07 issue)
The boatman of death and his vessel. From my 12/20/18 posting “Ask not for whom the reaper scythes”, a Bizarro in #1 there:
(#6) The Grim Reaper as a gondolier, on a canal in Venice
The death merchant of Venice steering a gondola (much as in Price’s cartoon above), evoking Death in Venice, and the image of Charon the boatman of death (discussion of all of this in my 2018 posting).
Two images of Charon at work, from 19th-century art, for comparison:
(#7) Charon, illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante’s Inferno (The Divine Comedy)
(#8) Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx (1861) by the Ukrainian-born Russian painter Alexander Litovchenko
And then a more spectacular vessel of death, the fiery Viking death boat as imagined by modern builders:
(#9) Members of the Viking Jarl Squad surround a burning viking galley ship during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival, Lerwick, Shetland Islands, in 2010 (note the animal figurehead)
Good News Bad News. A joke routine that presumably developed from expressions conceding, in various ways, that the good is mixed with the bad. But it has become a routine, a formula built around “The good news is … the bad news is …” (where, typically, the bad news totally undoes the effect of the good news), with a number of variants, as in #1 above.
There are many websites devoted to collecting these jokes, and a huge number have been turned into cartoons. Many are distressing, a fair number dark or nasty. Here’s a learnèd Benjamin Schwartz example from my 3/26/15 posting “The cat at the vets”:
(#10) “The vet in the cartoon uses the “good news – bad news” formula to explain things to Schrödinger: the good news is that the cat is alive; the bad news is that the cat is dead.”
On the darker and sometimes nastier side, the Cyanide and Happiness strip has done dozens of Good News Bad News jokes. In this case, with the bad news first:
(#11) The 8/1/15 strip
I’ve spent some time trying to track down an account of the history of the joke routine (searching on-line and consulting dictionaries of quotations and websites on phrase origins), without success. I will now seek help from the lexicographic hounds of the American Dialect Society.
June 28, 2019 at 2:02 pm |
I have two favourite good news/bad news jokes. Both are religious themed, and begin with the Pope convening the College of Cardinals and telling them “I have good news and bad news; which do you want to hear first?”
The first joke: The Dean of the College says, “The good news, Your Holiness.” The Pope says, “Jesus has returned to earth. The Second Coming has happened!” The Cardinals are overjoyed, and throw their red hats in the air. The Dean stops and remembers, and then asks, “Your Holiness, what’s the bad news?” The Pope sighs and says, “He called from Salt Lake City.”
The second joke: “The Dean of the College says, “The good news, Your Holiness.” The Pope says, “The Church has gotten a $500 million donation from an American named Frank Purdue, on the condition that we change the Lord’s Prayer from ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ to ‘Give us this day our daily chicken.” The Cardinals are overjoyed and throw their hats in the air. The Dean then asks, “So, Your Holiness, what’s the bad news?” The Pope sighs and says, “We’ve lost the Wonder Bread account.” This second one came in handy when we had the recent news that the Pope approved a change in the wording of the Italian version of the Lord’s Prayer.
July 7, 2019 at 4:39 am |
Report from my posting to ADS-L. Some people found much more recent occurrences on the net (only back to ca. 1980, when the joke routine had clearly been long established), or antecedents to Good News Bad News in various expressions of the idea that the news is mixed, there’s a good side and a bad side to much of it, etc., which I was aware of and was specifically not asking about. But, using newspaper archives, Peter Reitan got things back to 1942. Peter wrote:
To me this has the feel of an already established routine, with its origins in American vaudeville or the British music hall or similar popular cultural practices elsewhere in Europe.
July 7, 2019 at 8:14 am |
So I announce on ADS-L that 1942 is the best we’ve done to date, and then of course antedatings appear. Two, one of them quite considerable:
From Jon Lighter:
From Stephen Goranson:
Note 7/7 from Garson O’Toole:
July 7, 2019 at 8:28 am |
And now from Geoff Nathan on ADS-L:
The form is:
The good thing about X is Y.
The bad thing about X is Y.
conveying that property Y of X is both good (in one way) and bad (in another).
July 7, 2019 at 10:51 am |
Addendum to Geoff Nathan’s special case, from Margaret Winters on ADS-L:
July 7, 2019 at 1:03 pm |
And from Garson O’Toole on 7/7:
(AZ note: Rise and Cherry Burton are genuine Yorkshire placenames, not OCR errors.)
December 13, 2020 at 8:54 am |
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May 9, 2021 at 6:57 am |
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