My Funny Bone Tickled
Who knows why a particular movie, joke or cartoon will make some of us us laugh and not others? There is no accounting for taste, I hear. More than most forms of humor, The New Yorker cartoons seem to be divisive. I know some people with fairly well-developed senses of humor—by which I mean, of course, they often find funny the things I find funny—who dislike these cartoons intensely. It is tempting to think that they just haven’t seen enough of them. I know I can sometimes thumb through an entire issue of the magazine without running across one cartoon that makes me chuckle. At other times, I want to frame half of them.[1]
This morning, while reading a depressing account of where Egypt is three years after its January 25th Revolution, I turned a page to see the cartoon shown above (you must click on it to see a larger, more readable version).[2] I did a spit take. Even now I’m not quite sure what is so funny about it, but every time I think of that gigantic phone ringing behind the heads of the couple on the couch, I laugh out loud. Not “LOL,” but literally out loud.
I’m betting the reaction of most of you who read this will be, “meh” or worse. But maybe I’m wrong and this just happens to be the funniest cartoon of the year? Who knows, but if you are a fan of The New Yorker cartoons, or even less likely, Morley Safer, you will enjoy this video:
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Notes
- I am not snooty enough to actually subscribe to The New Yorker. Years ago I did for maybe six months: I may have been going through a “snooty phase.” I do read it pretty regularly online where slideshows of its cartoons are made available. This morning I was reading a printed copy of the March 10, 2014 edition. I liberated it from a waiting room at the VA hospital on Friday. [^]
- I don’t own the image reproduced above. You will notice the watermark on the large version of it. I am hopeful this can be considered “fair use” and to assuage my guilt, provide for your consideration a link to a site where you can buy an original print of it: www.condenaststore.com/. [^]
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