On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:
(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)
No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.
Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.
Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:
(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)
Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:
(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)
There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)
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