The joke is that God is torturing Satan by sending clowns and mimes down to him. This is a reversal of the usual procedure of sending people to Satan to *be* tortured.
Iron Curtain story: Satan is showing a new arrival the various ways in which he could suffer for eternity. One room contains a large bed, upon which “XYZ” (any well-known and hated politician, such as Walter Ulbricht) is romping around with a naked “ABC” (any beautiful movie star, such as Brigitte Bardot). The arrival says that he would take that room, but Satan informs him that “That’s not a reward for Ulbricht, that a punishment for Bardot”.
@Mitch: Did you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or just 🤷? (Which may be what you had; I won’t know till it posts…)
I type eg “shrug emoji” into duck duck go, and it usually gives me something from https://emojipedia.org/ plus a few others I can double check against. https://listemoji.com/ is pretty good for browsing big emoji pictures, but if you want to know their meanings, you have to copy the picture and it tells you its name, and then you can look that up in emojipedia, or run it into one of the random other lists that show up in the ddg results just to double check.
Thanks, larK. I wanted an emoji, not a typed emoticon, in this case. (I do use typed smileys, sometimes.) The one I’m thinking of had both forearms up, and out to the respective sides. I used to use that fairly often, but evidently not recently, as I didn’t find it in my “recent” area, and tired very fast of scrolling thru all the people figures and trying to see the tiny shapes. The one I grabbed is almost right, but seems to have crossed arms in a sort of blocking gesture. The one you use is much more like what I’m recalling.
I appreciate the advice on authoritative lookup, but for present purposes I’m more after quick-and-dirty. I had to replace my phone, and did install an add-on keyboard program with some features I like (especially, scroll keys!). But there was a feature the old phone had, that I thought came with the kybd program, that watched what you type (in certain contexts) and sometimes would suggest an emoji to insert! I oughta track that down.
We had this here before, on April 7, 2019, when it was a LOL: “I realized I had a significant backlog of LOLs submitted by Andréa, so I’m going to upload a bunch of them at once…”
I commented, and then answered myself, thuswise:
1) Odd that God is in the bottom panel, while the Devil takes the topmost. Casual negligence? A lack of traditional situational visual awareness (despite verbally stating “down here” in the top spot)? A possible simple error in pasting two separate drawings together? Or a brave, subtle choice illustrating some deeper theological truth? We shall never know.
2) Probably simply because set-up Speech Bubble has to come first/top, and God’s Reaction second/bottom. Cartoon dynamics.
How do I find emoji?
On a Mac, Command-Control-Space (or, in most apps, menu, Edit > Emoji & Symbols). This brings up a palette in which you can search the entire Unicode space. So, type “shrug”. This finds seven characters: s, h, r, u, g, 🤷♀️ [woman shrugging], 🤷♂️ [man shrugging].
I don’t know how they will render on your machine. My woman shrugging looks different than the one Mithch4 posted.
Oh wait, I looked it up. Mitch4 posted 🙅♀️ [woman gesturing no] or [woman making a cross sign with her arms].
If you’ve ever fed a dog, you’d understand . . . and I feed five, twice a day. If ONLY they’d MIME their excitement.
One dances on her hind legs, barking, right in front of me, only she’s hopping backwards (kinda like Ginger Rogers, without the high heels; I’m Fred Astaire, without the top hat and grace).
One – who doesn’t know how to bark, it seems – twirls round and round ’til her collar flies off.
One – whose back legs don’t work – twirls round and round, but pivoting on the nonworking back legs, so she never gets up the speed to sling off her collar.
One dances on her hind legs and gets so excited that she ‘backwards sneezes’ and I have to close her nose ’til she calms down.
And one – my Service Dog – just sits in the dogs’ toybox (think E.T. in the closet among the stuffed toys) and quivers (we’ve finally stopped her from barking hysterically).
All this enthusiasm, for 1/3 cup of kibble, one tablespoon of pumpkin and, unbeknownst them, various medications and/or supplements.
So yeah, a miming dog would be nice. Come to think on it, Heather (from a puppy mill), who doesn’t know how to bark (or just hasn’t had anything to say for the past five years), might be considered the miming dog. Huh. Now, that’s funny. To me.
If further answer is needed to “what is the joke?” I might duck the question by saying it is meant not as really funny but just an oddity. Interesting to see the mime miming his pleasure, as though silence were his natural state instead of an artistic decision; also weird to see the mime being kept as a pet or something. And, probably not intended but struck me, a sort of satire on how the industry sells feed for many different species but tries to brand them all as Chow.
Thank you for saying so. My writing becomes inspired when I write about my dogs. I’ve written about my various dogs (Airedales, Cairns,Chorkie and Havanese) since 1996, when I joined some listservs. It’s been suggested I publish ’em all, but 1) there were so many; and 2) they’ve all disappeared into the ether, as I never thought of saving them.
Fame is fleeting . . . altho I have written and still maintain hundreds of Rescue and Travel websites. Not exactly the same, tho, but more pictures.
Sigh…. why must dogs be so picky. Every day it is such an ordeal putting just the right amount of food in her bowl and warming to just the right temperature and pretending not to watch her and hope and hope she wont just turn up her nose and walk away. Why can’t a dog be more like a cat who just demands food and gobbles whatever you put before him. …. Of course, my dog is much cleaner and hygienic than my cat…..
> Mitch, I don’t get “Mime Chow”. I mean okay, he’s feeding it to the mime, but?
He’s feeding it to a mime.
…….
Okay…. it’s just funny to imagine a mime as a pet. This may be funnier/less funny/similar to/quite different than Futurama’s “Bachelor Chow”.
“Mitch, I don’t get “Mime Chow”. I mean okay, he’s feeding it to the mime, but?”
Presumably not what the cartoonist had in mind, but my first thought was a riff on the old “Give it to Mikey — he hates everything! — Hey, Mikey LIKES it!” commercial, only this time it’s “Mimey LIKES it!”
Perhaps we’ve already discussed that commercial here before, but that commercial always bothered me. What the heck was the point of giving it to Mikey if he hates everything? Were they hoping that he would dump it in the trash in disgust for them?
@ W.W. – The point of giving the “Life” to Mikey was that the other two kids figured that he would be an extra-sensitive filter for anything that tastes bad. They were simply hoping for confirmation of their preconceived verdict, so they would have an excuse not to risk it on themselves.
P.S. During my recent trip to Washington, one of the things I used to fill up some empty space in my suitcase for the return trip was a collection of (mostly unhealthy) cereals, none of which is available in Germany. I knew that my wife likes “Life”, so I made sure to include it in the set.
P.P.S. @ woozy – “Futurama’s “Bachelor Chow””
I remember comments about someone going out to buy a 50 pound sack of “Purina Bachelor Chow” in college, decades before Futurama recycled the joke.
I am afraid of animals – including dogs, so of course the next child in the family – my sister D loved them. While I was in high school I went on weekend trip with some group I belonged to and when I arrived home, my parents had gotten my sister a dog. (My adventures in having to take it care of it at times not being described.) It at least was a relatively small and a calm dog and did not jump on me. Understand I wish no animals any malice, I just must have had bad times with animals in a former life.
We all aged – my parents, me, both my sisters and the dog. Both me and D were married and out of the house, but D’s dog remained in the house with my parents and our “baby” sister (now in her 50s) C. My parents went on a trip to Europe and mom left food for C and the dog. Dog had been aging and not always well, but when my parents left he was okay and still okay when they returned.
The first night my parents were home mom found that C had not eaten all of the spaghetti and meatballs – with jarred tomato sauce that mom had left among the meals for C. Mom heated it up and fed it to the dog – dog ate it and died. If that dog had been a bit more picky he would not have died at that point in time. (Robert says my cooking is much better – and safer – than my mother’s.)
That’s what I wondered; was a necropsy done? Even just a vet’s thoughts on what might’ve caused this? Feeding a dog people food is really a bad thing – sounds to me like it may have had acute pancreatitis. https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/health/pancreatitis-in-dogs/
No followup was done about the dog. I realize it might not be related – but then again, you have not eaten my mother’s cooking plus the food had been in the fridge for over a week – and it would never occur to me to feed a dog meatballs and spaghetti.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The joke is in the last line, “Just who do you think you are?!” He’s God. He can do anything he wants.
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CWAA. No longer just for New Yorker cartoons.
Condemning two souls to eternal torment because they had jobs that Internet memes decided to pile on hating seems like a terribly unjust thing to do.
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The joke is nobody likes mimes and everybody is afraid of clowns.
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The joke is that God is torturing Satan by sending clowns and mimes down to him. This is a reversal of the usual procedure of sending people to Satan to *be* tortured.
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Post-WWI joke:
GOD: I’ve got a full house.
DEVIL: Ha! I’ve got four kings!
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Iron Curtain story: Satan is showing a new arrival the various ways in which he could suffer for eternity. One room contains a large bed, upon which “XYZ” (any well-known and hated politician, such as Walter Ulbricht) is romping around with a naked “ABC” (any beautiful movie star, such as Brigitte Bardot). The arrival says that he would take that room, but Satan informs him that “That’s not a reward for Ulbricht, that a punishment for Bardot”.
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I thought the main joke was just the “Who do you think you are?” line. 🙅♀️
(I don’t think I found the two-handed shrug. How do you guys find the emoji you want?)
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Yesterday’s ‘Mime in the Library’ comic . . .
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I can get why GOD would like the feel of an old fashioned phone, but why a cord?
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From the retro Kliban feed on GoComics,this was up yesterday:
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@Mitch: Did you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or just 🤷? (Which may be what you had; I won’t know till it posts…)
I type eg “shrug emoji” into duck duck go, and it usually gives me something from https://emojipedia.org/ plus a few others I can double check against. https://listemoji.com/ is pretty good for browsing big emoji pictures, but if you want to know their meanings, you have to copy the picture and it tells you its name, and then you can look that up in emojipedia, or run it into one of the random other lists that show up in the ddg results just to double check.
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Thanks, larK. I wanted an emoji, not a typed emoticon, in this case. (I do use typed smileys, sometimes.) The one I’m thinking of had both forearms up, and out to the respective sides. I used to use that fairly often, but evidently not recently, as I didn’t find it in my “recent” area, and tired very fast of scrolling thru all the people figures and trying to see the tiny shapes. The one I grabbed is almost right, but seems to have crossed arms in a sort of blocking gesture. The one you use is much more like what I’m recalling.
I appreciate the advice on authoritative lookup, but for present purposes I’m more after quick-and-dirty. I had to replace my phone, and did install an add-on keyboard program with some features I like (especially, scroll keys!). But there was a feature the old phone had, that I thought came with the kybd program, that watched what you type (in certain contexts) and sometimes would suggest an emoji to insert! I oughta track that down.
LikeLike
We had this here before, on April 7, 2019, when it was a LOL: “I realized I had a significant backlog of LOLs submitted by Andréa, so I’m going to upload a bunch of them at once…”
I commented, and then answered myself, thuswise:
1) Odd that God is in the bottom panel, while the Devil takes the topmost. Casual negligence? A lack of traditional situational visual awareness (despite verbally stating “down here” in the top spot)? A possible simple error in pasting two separate drawings together? Or a brave, subtle choice illustrating some deeper theological truth? We shall never know.
2) Probably simply because set-up Speech Bubble has to come first/top, and God’s Reaction second/bottom. Cartoon dynamics.
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This made me chuckle, both for the “who do you think you are,” but also for the idea that even the devil would have having mimes and clowns around.
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If that’s a dedicated “hotline,” I’d have made God’s phone red and Satan’s phone gold.
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My preferred “shrug” symbol (on the rare occasions that I use one) is:
\_(?)_/
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I’ll happily defer to Shrug on the proper representation!
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If mimes and clowns get along together like they do in “Shakes the Clown”, the mime and the clown are each other’s punishment.
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How do I find emoji?
On a Mac, Command-Control-Space (or, in most apps, menu, Edit > Emoji & Symbols). This brings up a palette in which you can search the entire Unicode space. So, type “shrug”. This finds seven characters: s, h, r, u, g, 🤷♀️ [woman shrugging], 🤷♂️ [man shrugging].
I don’t know how they will render on your machine. My woman shrugging looks different than the one Mithch4 posted.
Oh wait, I looked it up. Mitch4 posted 🙅♀️ [woman gesturing no] or [woman making a cross sign with her arms].
I have no idea how to do this on other devices.
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Mitch, I don’t get “Mime Chow”. I mean okay, he’s feeding it to the mime, but?
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If you’ve ever fed a dog, you’d understand . . . and I feed five, twice a day. If ONLY they’d MIME their excitement.
One dances on her hind legs, barking, right in front of me, only she’s hopping backwards (kinda like Ginger Rogers, without the high heels; I’m Fred Astaire, without the top hat and grace).
One – who doesn’t know how to bark, it seems – twirls round and round ’til her collar flies off.
One – whose back legs don’t work – twirls round and round, but pivoting on the nonworking back legs, so she never gets up the speed to sling off her collar.
One dances on her hind legs and gets so excited that she ‘backwards sneezes’ and I have to close her nose ’til she calms down.
And one – my Service Dog – just sits in the dogs’ toybox (think E.T. in the closet among the stuffed toys) and quivers (we’ve finally stopped her from barking hysterically).
All this enthusiasm, for 1/3 cup of kibble, one tablespoon of pumpkin and, unbeknownst them, various medications and/or supplements.
So yeah, a miming dog would be nice. Come to think on it, Heather (from a puppy mill), who doesn’t know how to bark (or just hasn’t had anything to say for the past five years), might be considered the miming dog. Huh. Now, that’s funny. To me.
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Wonderful word-painting, Andrea!
If further answer is needed to “what is the joke?” I might duck the question by saying it is meant not as really funny but just an oddity. Interesting to see the mime miming his pleasure, as though silence were his natural state instead of an artistic decision; also weird to see the mime being kept as a pet or something. And, probably not intended but struck me, a sort of satire on how the industry sells feed for many different species but tries to brand them all as Chow.
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“Wonderful word-painting, Andrea! ”
Thank you for saying so. My writing becomes inspired when I write about my dogs. I’ve written about my various dogs (Airedales, Cairns,Chorkie and Havanese) since 1996, when I joined some listservs. It’s been suggested I publish ’em all, but 1) there were so many; and 2) they’ve all disappeared into the ether, as I never thought of saving them.
Fame is fleeting . . . altho I have written and still maintain hundreds of Rescue and Travel websites. Not exactly the same, tho, but more pictures.
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Speaking of feeding dogs . . .
Never happen . . .
Always happens . . .
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Sigh…. why must dogs be so picky. Every day it is such an ordeal putting just the right amount of food in her bowl and warming to just the right temperature and pretending not to watch her and hope and hope she wont just turn up her nose and walk away. Why can’t a dog be more like a cat who just demands food and gobbles whatever you put before him. …. Of course, my dog is much cleaner and hygienic than my cat…..
> Mitch, I don’t get “Mime Chow”. I mean okay, he’s feeding it to the mime, but?
He’s feeding it to a mime.
…….
Okay…. it’s just funny to imagine a mime as a pet. This may be funnier/less funny/similar to/quite different than Futurama’s “Bachelor Chow”.
LikeLike
“Mitch, I don’t get “Mime Chow”. I mean okay, he’s feeding it to the mime, but?”
Presumably not what the cartoonist had in mind, but my first thought was a riff on the old “Give it to Mikey — he hates everything! — Hey, Mikey LIKES it!” commercial, only this time it’s “Mimey LIKES it!”
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Perhaps we’ve already discussed that commercial here before, but that commercial always bothered me. What the heck was the point of giving it to Mikey if he hates everything? Were they hoping that he would dump it in the trash in disgust for them?
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“Wonderful word-painting, Andrea!”
Hubby has said he’d be glad to take a video of ‘feeding time at the zoo’.
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@ W.W. – The point of giving the “Life” to Mikey was that the other two kids figured that he would be an extra-sensitive filter for anything that tastes bad. They were simply hoping for confirmation of their preconceived verdict, so they would have an excuse not to risk it on themselves.
P.S. During my recent trip to Washington, one of the things I used to fill up some empty space in my suitcase for the return trip was a collection of (mostly unhealthy) cereals, none of which is available in Germany. I knew that my wife likes “Life”, so I made sure to include it in the set.
P.P.S. @ woozy – “Futurama’s “Bachelor Chow””
I remember comments about someone going out to buy a 50 pound sack of “Purina Bachelor Chow” in college, decades before Futurama recycled the joke.
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When it was my wife’s turn to host her poetry workshop group, I was always sent to the store to pick up “poet chow” for them.
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“They were simply hoping for confirmation of their preconceived verdict, so they would have an excuse not to risk it on themselves.”
This still doesn’t make sense to me. Why did they need an excuse? They could just not eat it.
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They would need to justify not-eating to the adults, when these show up later …
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woozy –
I am afraid of animals – including dogs, so of course the next child in the family – my sister D loved them. While I was in high school I went on weekend trip with some group I belonged to and when I arrived home, my parents had gotten my sister a dog. (My adventures in having to take it care of it at times not being described.) It at least was a relatively small and a calm dog and did not jump on me. Understand I wish no animals any malice, I just must have had bad times with animals in a former life.
We all aged – my parents, me, both my sisters and the dog. Both me and D were married and out of the house, but D’s dog remained in the house with my parents and our “baby” sister (now in her 50s) C. My parents went on a trip to Europe and mom left food for C and the dog. Dog had been aging and not always well, but when my parents left he was okay and still okay when they returned.
The first night my parents were home mom found that C had not eaten all of the spaghetti and meatballs – with jarred tomato sauce that mom had left among the meals for C. Mom heated it up and fed it to the dog – dog ate it and died. If that dog had been a bit more picky he would not have died at that point in time. (Robert says my cooking is much better – and safer – than my mother’s.)
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Correlation is not causation. The dog might have died of unrelated causes.
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That’s what I wondered; was a necropsy done? Even just a vet’s thoughts on what might’ve caused this? Feeding a dog people food is really a bad thing – sounds to me like it may have had acute pancreatitis.
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/health/pancreatitis-in-dogs/
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No followup was done about the dog. I realize it might not be related – but then again, you have not eaten my mother’s cooking plus the food had been in the fridge for over a week – and it would never occur to me to feed a dog meatballs and spaghetti.
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