From New Yorker bob (Bob Eckstein) — a regular visitor on this blog — in the West Side Rag (in NYC), as reproduced in his 8/9 newsletter The Bob, this charmingly absurdist cartoon:
(#1) Into an ordinary living room obtrudes one of the banes of urban street life, the often years-long scaffolding for construction projects — highlighted here by showing not just the scaffold structure of pipes, but also some green protective sheeting for the project (this in an otherwise b&w cartoon, so it’s shriekingly obtrusive)
Very roughly, cartoons and comics hinge on either word play (very commonly, punning) or the humor of situation. In turn, the humor of situation either comments on social, cultural, or political matters, or displays an absurdity — like surrealistic art, depicting discordant, inappropriate, ambivalent, or inexplicable elements of some situation, as if in a dream. And then, a lot of absurdos (absurdist cartoons) depict scenes that seem surreal because they unfold simultaneously in two different worlds, in what I’ll call an anchor world and an intrusive world.
The cartoon in #1 is a two-world absurdo. The anchor world is a modern middle-class living room, inhabited by three characters all sitting on comfortable furniture in the room: two women engaged in conversation about the third character, Harry, who’s engrossed in reading something. The trouble with Harry is that he’s covered in scaffolding, as in the intrusive world, a city street where construction is going on.
