Isn’t this less “suicide pact” than a form of Russian Roulette? Or Railroad Roulette, whatever? Because only one of them is going to die.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
And if someone looked closely at the tracks passing through the switch, they could easily tell which one it would be.
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They are both going to die. Only one will be killed by the train though.
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My first image was of the train doing a holographic split, going both ways up the middle. The mind’s eye…
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I wouldn’t really call it a form of Russian Roulette either because with that, there is only a chance of a death. The bigger question for me was how is this in any way supposed to be funny?
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Perhaps this is in reference to another famous Addams’ cartoon, in which a skier appears to have gone around a tree in both directions.
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This couple cannot live together. But – it is criminal for one to kill the other; it is being a feeble quitter to just give up and kill yourself, and; it is criminal and rude to kill the other and then kill yourself. So best to leave it to the throw of the die of the switch of the railway system.
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By any chance is this Schrodinger’s Railroad?
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I think narmitaj’s description captures the atmosphere perfectly, but I wonder whether an enhanced caption might have highlighted it better, such as “Semi-Suicide Pact“, or perhaps “Monocide Pact” (probably not).
P.S. It wasn’t until I read beckoningchasm’s comment and checked the signature that I realized that this cartoon was by Addams, the pen and ink art doesn’t look at all like Addams’ typical grey wash coloration.
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If you had a train set when a boy, you know it’s easy to get the desired result: switch while the train is passing.
It happened a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%A9tigny-sur-Orge_train_crash
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@Kilby – Addams’ work in his later years was often just pen-and-ink, with no shadows or wash.
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@narmitaj: “. . . it is criminal and rude to kill the other and then kill yourself.”
Not just rude; devastating. A couple we were friends with did this/had this happen, and five years later, I still grieve. Suicide is one thing and a personal choice; killing a spouse to take her with you is beyond the pale. My dad used the threat of this to control my Mom and myself, so I guess it hit me harder than it would have someone who had never had the background I had.
And yes, HOW is this so-called comic even amusing, let alone funny?
The skier splitting for the tree – it was so far out of reality, it was funny and has become a classic.
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Olivier: That’s actually a workable solution to the Trolley Problem. As the trolley enters the switch, changing the direction the trolley is supposed to go will send the trolley sideways and derail it. If the intended victims are far enough away from the trolley when it stops, nobody dies.
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There is also one other victim of the suicide, one unseen and often forgotten. The Engineer of the train. He can see the death coming, but he can’t do anything to prevent it. The locomotive won’t stop in time.
Suicide by train is an almost daily occurrence on this country’s rail and commuter lines. Many Engineers have witnessed multiple suicides during their careers. Suicide in this manner is a selfish act, committed with no consideration for those left behind, including the people who involuntarily abet the act.
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When I first saw the comic, I thought it seemed particularly dark. THEN I noticed the signature. :-)
I do think that there is a likelihood that both would die. The way the track switch is drawn, there is no groove for the train wheels to pass through the switch (to use a railroad term, there is no “frog” depicted in the comic) the locomotive will derail, and the entire yard will be torn up by the resulting pileup of railroad cars. :-)
Also, the more I read of the “Trolley Problem” in various discussions over the last few years, as a railroad enthusiast, the whole thought experiment situation bugs me. If there are people standing in the way, it’s their own damned fault for standing on railroad property and not getting out of the way when they can see the trolley approaching. If you can handwave away any “deadman” control for the motorman, you can handwave the switchman into herding the pedestrians to safety. :-P
And a point to JerrytheMacGuy for not calling engineers “conductors”, as countless reporters and news anchors do, much to my annoyance.
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…and Olivier, who says you need to be a child to enjoy a model railroad?
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@ JerrytheMacGuy – “one other victim … The Engineer…”
We had a next-door neighbor who used to be an engineer in the German rail system. I don’t know how many suicides he witnessed, but I do know that it was the reason he quit being an engineer and switched over to working in the dining car.
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Charles Addams, RIP, was probably the darkest cartoonist ever. So, yes, this is a cartoon he would have conceived and probably thought hilarious. People who are upset about this one probably haven’t seen many of his cartoons.
“Death ray, fiddlesticks! It doesn’t even slow them up.”
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@Grawlix: not me! ;)
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Two tracks diverged in the train yard, I took the track less traveled by (to lie on) and that is why I am still alive.
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Edward Gorey is even more macabre, both in his drawings and his writings.
“‘It doesn’t even slow them up.’”
I would say, ‘slow them down’. is this a regional thing . . . speed UP; slow DOWN?
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“speed UP; slow DOWN?”
“”He would sit up all night writing waltzes and sit down at the piano the next day and practice them. Why would he sit UP at night and sit DOWN during the day? I don’t know. It’s YOUR language.” — Victor Borge
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Our classical music station has a daily feature from the retired former morning show host, “Carl’s Almanac”. Today he noted the date as Victor Borge’s birthday, and described him as “a great pia … well, a *good* pianist, and a great entertainer.”
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Grawlix, I’m happy to say lately I’ve been seeing philosophers more or less dismiss the Trolley Problem as ill-constructed and unanswerable without situating it much more than the usual bare statements of it. So for example, if it is posed as what action would / should I take, the first thing to ask is /who am I?/ — like, am I a railway employee? Have I been charged with supervising this area? If not, then is there any basis for thinking I can take in at a glance what the positions of the switches are? And that I have the skills to divert them?
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On WFMT! I used to listen to him years ago; my parents ALWAYS listened to WFMT and I remember the name, Carl Grapentine. Also Marty Robbins, Ray Norstrand, Studs Terkel, all those mellifluous voices . . . The Midnight Special was where I first heard The Beatles and so much other music of different genres [or does that only mean books?]. And we ALWAYS stayed up for the New Year’s Eve Midnight Special.
For a while, WFMR was another classical station I listened to, out of Milwaukee; it is now defunct.
Thanks for a short trip down memory lane, back to the start of my love of classical music.
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Well, to answer Borges, in this case you can still easily trace back the metaphorical imperatives that lead to the construction: at night, you sleep, and to sleep you get down to a prone position from an active upright position. So, any disruption or contrast to this normal way of things is marked by showing the opposite direction than normally followed, so if you are NOT sleeping, NOT going down to a prone position from your daytime upright one, then you are staying UP. Likewise, if during the day you suddenly need to concentrate on a more cerebral activity, and not be running around in a upright position as you tend to all day, then you are sitting DOWN to write or whatever.
I gladly accept that English has a great confusion of influences and detritus and a lack of any great over-riding ordering principle (or maybe too many of them, and often conflicting), but that doesn’t mean that any given example doesn’t come from a logical and consistent origin.
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Andréa: You can listen to WFMT on the Internet with your computer and your smartphone. You may not hear Studs Terkel but you will hear the voice of Candice Agree, one of the radio hosts. You can disagree but I like her.
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Nobody would diss Agree.
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mitch4: such quibbles miss the point of trolley problems, which (to the extent there is any) seems to be about making choices between unpalatable alternatives, rather than the rather ridiculous setting.
But I suppose it amounts to the same thing — the question contains unreasonable assumptions.
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The Trolley Problem has never been both explained and mocked as well as on a second – season episode of The Good Place.
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Whoops, that was just the second half of a two-part comic (wow, long comic). Here’s part 1:
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