In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:
(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.
Examples: from a cartoon and from a movie. From my 10/15/21 posting “Desert Island spelling”, with a cartoon on a misspelled message calling for help; and a movie stickup-note apparently invoking a GUB (and so eliciting critiques of the robber’s spelling):
A wrenchingly funny E. S. Glenn cartoon in the latest (10/18/21) issue of the New Yorker:
(2)
… the central point is the (in this case, wicked) obtuseness of spelling peevers, so intent on pointing out inadvertent typos and also mistaken spellings (the latter presumably being at issue in the cartoon) that they neglect to heed a desperate plea for help from a starving man.
The writer of this profoundly unhelpful message clearly understood the intent of the castaway’s cry for help — otherwise they couldn’t have corrected the spelling — but they utterly ignore this content in favor of officiously hectoring the writer over his spelling (“for his own good”, they would undoubtedly say). This is cluelessness so dramatic it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s close enough to events of real life to sting.
Here it’s spelling. In Woody Allen’s early movie Take the Money and Run it’s handwriting. From my 5/3/16 posting “Lawyers, Gubs and Monkeys”:
Gubs is a reference to the many [court] cases involving startlingly inept bank robbers, like Virgil Starkwell in Woody Allen’s early movie Take the Money and Run … Virgil’s attempt to rob a bank is foiled when the teller reads his handwritten note intended to say I’M POINTING A GUN AT YOU as … GUB …
The note is clearly a stickup note; if you then can’t figure out that what looks at first glance to be GUB was meant to be GUN, then you’re being deliberately uncooperative. (Back in the movie, while the tellers are arguing over the interpretation of apparent GUB, the cops arrive and haul Virgil off to prison. The scene is achingly funny. But of course we know we’re watching a movie. Made by a comic.)
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