The Dean stops and remembers, and then asks, “Your Holiness, what’s the bad news?” The Pope sighs and says, “He called from Salt Lake City.” The Second Coming has happened!” The Cardinals are overjoyed, and throw their red hats in the air. The first joke: The Dean of the College says, “The good news, Your Holiness.” The Pope says, “Jesus has returned to earth. ![]() Both are religious themed, and begin with the Pope convening the College of Cardinals and telling them “I have good news and bad news which do you want to hear first?” I have two favourite good news/bad news jokes. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Ĩ Responses to “The Desert Island Reaper” You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. This entry was posted on Jat 4:56 pm and is filed under Art, Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Routines and rituals. I will now seek help from the lexicographic hounds of the American Dialect Society. I’ve spent some time trying to track down an account of the history of the joke routine (searching on-line and consulting dictionaries of quotations and websites on phrase origins), without success. On the darker and sometimes nastier side, the Cyanide and Happiness strip has done dozens of Good News Bad News jokes. (#10) “The vet in the cartoon uses the “good news – bad news” formula to explain things to Schrödinger: the good news is that the cat is alive the bad news is that the cat is dead.” Here’s a learnèd Benjamin Schwartz example from my 3/26/15 posting “The cat at the vets”: Many are distressing, a fair number dark or nasty. There are many websites devoted to collecting these jokes, and a huge number have been turned into cartoons. But it has become a routine, a formula built around “The good news is … the bad news is …” (where, typically, the bad news totally undoes the effect of the good news), with a number of variants, as in #1 above. A joke routine that presumably developed from expressions conceding, in various ways, that the good is mixed with the bad. (#9) Members of the Viking Jarl Squad surround a burning viking galley ship during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival, Lerwick, Shetland Islands, in 2010 (note the animal figurehead) (#8) Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx (1861) by the Ukrainian-born Russian painter Alexander LitovchenkoĪnd then a more spectacular vessel of death, the fiery Viking death boat as imagined by modern builders: (#7) Charon, illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante’s Inferno ( The Divine Comedy) Two images of Charon at work, from 19th-century art, for comparison: The death merchant of Venice steering a gondola (much as in Price’s cartoon above), evoking Death in Venice, and the image of Charon the boatman of death (discussion of all of this in my 2018 posting). (#6) The Grim Reaper as a gondolier, on a canal in Venice From my 12/20/18 posting “Ask not for whom the reaper scythes”, a Bizarro in #1 there: (#5) The Reaper has scythed his only companion and is now truly alone in death (from the New Yorker‘s 2/5/07 issue) Harry Bliss, who’s done dozens of Grim Reapers, has been there, with an especially poignant strip: ![]() (#4) From my 6/11/18 posting “In case of cartoons, see therapist”, #4 there, a Strange Brew cartoon by John Deering, with Psychiatrist + Desert Islandīut Hilary Price is not the first to cross Desert Island with Grim Reaper. (#3) From my 4/13/17 posting “Three more reapings”, #1 there, a Bizarro with Psychiatrist + Grim Reaper (#2) From my 5/1/16 posting “Between the desert and the crouch”, a Bizarro with Psychiatrist + Desert Crawl (plus self-referentiality) The Psychiatrist meme seems to have a particular affinity for compounding I’ve posted three on this blog already: Doubly memic cartoons are more common than you might imagine, possibly because cartoonists view them as an interesting challenge. The good news is verbalized in the cartoon, the bad news is implicit in the figure of the Grim Reaper.Īs an extra, the boat that the Grim Reaper is steering towards the little island looks a lot like a gondola, so evoking Death in Venice and Charon the boatman of death, and possibly more indirectly, a Viking funeral boat with an animal-head prow.Ĭompound cartoon memes. ![]() (#1) A compound, Desert Island + Grim ReaperĪlso incorporating a joke formula, the Good News Bad News routine. Today’s Rhymes With Orange, combining two familiar cartoon memes:
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