Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on by John McIntyre, this poignant, or even mordant, eat the rich comic:

(#1) Artie (the artist) and Audie (his audience)

A possible continuation: in panel 5, Artie reluctantly says yes; and in panel 6, Audie goes, well, then, it’s not worth anything, so forget it.

Lessons in modern culture: one, the (only) reason to create things is to make money; and two, to survive, a creator has to sell themselves and their product.

Background note on the comic. I have found nothing on-line about eattherichcomic or its artist. The artist has circulated some images (including this one) on Reddit. I doubt very much that the artist makes any kind of living from these strips.

Background note: “I created something”. Suggesting any number of possibilities, among them:

I made some art.
I made some music.
I performed a dance.
I played a role.
I wrote something.
I did some research.

Background note: the source of the slogan/saying Eat the rich. From Wikipedia:

Eat the Rich is an abbreviation of a saying attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Quand les pauvres n’auront plus rien à manger, ils mangeront les riches!” (When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich).

Then comes the revolution.

Uses of the slogan. It’s been used in popular culture for titles of songs, films, and books, among them, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

Eat the Rich is a 1987 British black comedy film directed by Peter Richardson. A co-production between Channel Four Films, Iron Fist Motion Pictures and Michael White Productions, it features cast members from the popular television series The Comic Strip Presents….

The film stars Lanah Pellay, and Nosher Powell as the Home Secretary, and includes cameos from a number of well-known figures, including: Miranda Richardson and Nigel Planer as vile DHSS clerks, Robbie Coltrane, Rik Mayall as a union boss, Paul McCartney, Shane MacGowan, Jennifer Saunders, Jimmy Fagg, Kathy Burke, Koo Stark, Dawn French, Bill Wyman, Jools Holland, Hugh Cornwell, Adrian Edmondson, Angela Bowie, and Lemmy.

(I quote the extended cast list for its celebrity surprises.)

The brief description from amazon.com:

A restaurant worker is fired from a posh London eatery, so the man returns with a band of terrorists, who begin feeding new customers with old customers. [note the variant argument structure of feeding old customers to new customers]

Comes the revolution, culinary variant.

Somewhat surprisingly, I haven’t seen the film. It got decidedly mixed reviews; clearly, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie it is not, nor (in a different key) Monty Python’s Lifeboat Sketch (“Eat you, sir?”)*. But mostly I just missed it.

[* Note. The story is that the original sketch featured gay sex in the Royal Navy, but the BBC was so incensed with this that the Pythons rewrote the sketch with cannibalism instead of mansex, while preserving the naval setting.]

This entry was posted on February 5, 2020 at 11:50 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Slogans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.