The comic strip Bizarro tends towards offbeat humor and obscure allusions. I can usually get the joke but today’s cartoon baffled me.
I initially saw the guy’s head as a glass but later thought it might be a finger. And clearly the word ‘validation’ is significant. But I don’t get the joke.
Any ideas?
In an effort to get away from the trans haters and their constant persecution, a group of trans people went out to a remote part of Colorado to start the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, to grow alpacas and other animals and to provide a safe haven for other trans and non-binary folk. They hope that theirs will be the first of many across the country. But when word got out to the local townspeople about who had moved there, some of them tried to force them away.
Samantha Bee’s show had a report on what went down.
To my mind, alpacas look like a creation of the Star Wars special effects team.
You can hardly blame him.
Who hasn’t encountered people in the workplace who are never satisfied with what others do but feel that they have to make suggestions for improvement even if they have no idea what they want or are completely unable to articulate it?
No one? I thought so.
Incidentally, the sound engineer who does not speak at all says the most with his expressions.
Cartoonists have a very difficult task because they do not have space to fill in all the necessary information and have to use images to convey a lot of background information so that people get the joke. But in doing so, they are heavily dependent on the reader getting the allusions.
As an example of how much background knowledge is needed for humor, take this cartoon.
To get the joke, you have to recognize the person as William Shakespeare. You have to know that he was a playwright and thus his works were performed by actors, that many of his plays were done at the Globe theater, and be familiar with the aphorism written on his shirt.
This makes humor hard to cross cultural boundaries.
Sometimes in one’s moments of idle thinking, one comes up with hypothetical scenarios that are so silly that one would think that no would bother to actually try them out. Fortunately, there are people who have the time and and resources to actually do it and film the results.
On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.
This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.
