Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The new issue of the New Yorker (dated 11/20/23) brings us a Psychiatrist cartoon by Elisabeth McNair, one of a special subtype I’ll call In-Group Psychiatrist (in which a patient from some extraordinary group — a dog, a robot, a squid, what have you, in #1 a book — is being treated by a therapist from that very group):

(#1) You wonder whether the notebook the therapist is writing on is itself preparing to publish its thoughts, and then it’s books all the way down

McNair is new to this blog. So a few words — her own — about her, and then some more cartoons she’s done for the New Yorker, starting with, yes, another In-Group Psychiatrist.

Who is McNair? From the laconic About page on her website:

I’m a cartoonist, illustrator, and designer living in Atlanta, Georgia. I draw cartoons for The New Yorker and work as a designer at Family Brothers.

Three other McNair New Yorker cartoons.

A bagel-on-bagel Psychiatrist cartoon:

(#2) Fancy, not plain

A Psychiatrist cartoon using the Who Xs the Xers? snowclone (which also provided me with the title for this posting):

(#3) A bottle of hand sanitizer being treated by a therapist who bears a resemblance to Sigmund Freud

On the basis for the Who Xs the Xers? snowclone, from Wikipedia:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348), a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who will watch the watchmen?”.

The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power

A Magrittean disavowal cartoon:

(#4) With the twist that the painting has been made from life, using as model a huge talking (and walking) pipe

On my many postings about Magrittean disavowals — all springing from René Magritte’s painting of a pipe, entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’ (reproduced in outline in #4) — see the Page on this blog.

 

This entry was posted on November 17, 2023 at 9:22 am and is filed under Art, Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Snowclones, Words and things. 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.