Crook wants to rob the guy, but they guy has no money, just a credit card. Crook makes him buy a violin, then makes him practice for years until he’s good enough to make money while busking. Once he makes money, the crook steals the money and leaves.
A man gets robbed but has no cash, only a credit card.
He takes the robber with him to the music store and buys a violin with the credit card.
They go to the man’s home where he practices playing the violin.
They go back out on the street, where the man plays the violin and gets a tip.
The robber takes the tip and leaves.
@madmup: Beat me by one minute.
Because the only way that armed mugger could get his money was with violins.
I didn’t notice the man with a hat has a gun in his pocket until I read in the comments that he is a robber.
One odd thing – among many – is that the practice (or even learning*) session possibly only takes one night, from the evidence of the small largely non-coloured panelettes – they wear exactly the same clothes and hairstyles as through the window it goes from light to dark and dark back to light. But then the “Later…” panel is obviously years later – the robber is grey-haired and has a walking aide, the violinist has thinning, shorter hair.
*It seems likely that the victim has no ability in playing the violin, so the robber has to teach him from the start, or at least watch as he teaches himself. In which case, a bit of variety and the passage of time might have been better for the panelette section.
Presumably – unless by the end the robber has been leeching off his victim for many years and ‘0000s in notes – it would have been more efficient for the robber to make the guy buy something, such as the violin, then steal the and sell it. But that is only one step up from holding up someone and making them go to a cash point.
Idea Curtain, I almost missed your joke on violins/violence!
sheep, maybe that’s no gun in his pocket, he’s just glad … oh never mind
According to the comments on Piraro’s page, this does take place over a long period of time. Absurdist, I think is what he was getting at.
I asked: What “Piraro’s page” do you mean? The latest I’m finding is last week’s “tapping on the window” cartoon, at both [Facebook] and [Bizarro blog]
And I liked seeing this: “St Louis Symphony’s instruments stolen…cops say it was a well orchestrated crime”
However, little patience for secret symbol fans documenting all the locations.
Oh, and nice to see our own Boise Ed in on the commenting there!
Ed, I think I saw someone here apparently agreeing with your “pawn ticket” theory. Did the Comics Kingdom commenters talk you out of that one, or are you sticking by it?
I looked for it on the Wayno site, but apparently he does not comment on the boss’s Sunday panels.
Actually he does, but as HIS blog comes out on Saturdays, it’ll be in his next one. Piraro’s blog usually comes out on Mondays; it’s not arrived in my mailbox yet.
I think theideacurtain has it, ie the joke element: robbery with violins.
1970s* English trad folk-rockers Steeleye Span had an instrumental track named that (though apparently the proper name of the track is Bank of Ireland)(Bank O’Violin… that pun sort of works). Here they are on Swiss TV in 1974 in a medley of that and a couple of other instrumentals. Long Hair! Weird Outfits! Double-necked Guitars!
The prancing woman in white is singer Maddy Prior, who obviously has no singing to do in an instrumental.
*They are still going, or at least were up until the pandemic. The last gig mentioned by their Wiki page was mid-Dec 2019. Their own site has prospective gig dates for 2021 and 2022, though some of the 21 dates are already rescheduled for 22.
For comics fans, of whom there must be many on this site, the Steeleye drummer is wearing the costume of Rubert Bear, a once-popular British cartoon character.
Steeleye Span made a Terry Pratchett DiscWorld CD. “Wintersmith is the twenty-second studio album by British folk rock band Steeleye Span. It was released in October 2013. It features the line-up of Maddy Prior, Peter Knight, Rick Kemp, Julian Littman, Pete Zorn and Liam Genockey. Guest musicians are Terry Pratchett (voice), Kathryn Tickell (Northumbrian pipes), Bob Johnson (vocals), and John Spiers (melodeon).
The songs on the album were inspired principally by Wintersmith and other Discworld books featuring Tiffany Aching. There is a spoken contribution by the author, Terry Pratchett.”
‘Robbery with violins’ doesn’t work ’cause there is only one violin in the comic.
(Replying to Danny and Andréa) It looks to me like Wayno only mentions Piraro’s blog and Sunday strips. (Though he does show and comment on his own Saturday ones — it’s not a “weekend blackout” thing.)
Here is the relevant bit from the current Wayno Blog:
Thanks, as always, for checking in here at the old Waynoblog. Don't forget to visit Dan Piraro's blog to see what he has to say about these cartoons, and to admire his always-spectacular Bizarro Sunday page.
Yes, Wayno’s blog comes out on Saturday, so if he were including or discussing a Sunday it probably would have to be the one from six days earlier, as
Andréa suggests. In this instance it would have been the tapping on the window one; but not in evidence. His link to Piraro’s Bizarro Blog is to top-level entry page, not to a dated post, so that avoids being specific and wrong.
I guess we’ll just have to wait ‘n’ see.
This is similar to the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon where Itchy ties Scratchy to railroad tracks and tries to get in a train to run him over but is booted out, so he enters engineering school and we see a montage of college life and graduation and he jumps in a train with his diploma and in the intervening years Scratchy has slowly worked on untying himself but still has his leg tangled.
Other commenters have got it, so I’ll just add an anecdote. I was in Kyiv, Ukraine, and while going through an underpass, a busker picked up his violin and started playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. It was bad that I briefly considered taking a few hryvnias from his case for my pain.
So we’ve given up CIDUBill’s policy that explanations from the cartoonists themselves are not sought, because they already had a chance to explain it in the making of the cartoon? I liked that policy, leads to more thoughtful discussion, and leads away from mere appeal to authority; ie: it builds good habits.
Well, there are degrees and circumstances.
After a substantial and productive discussion here, taking a look at a cartoonist’s well-established blog and picking up possible helpful cues seems pretty mild. It’s not like writing to them with “Oh please help us, we’re puzzled by your work and would like to sidle up and ask you”.
‘-)
“And that’s how I met… your mugger.”
Any working musician will tell you that there are many more efficient ways of raising money. In fact just about any other career brings in money more efficiently than playing music.
Like stealing the violin and selling it.
Applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task is classic comedy. I give you Laurel and Hardy in “The Music Box”, Rube Goldberg’s machines, and Spy vs. Spy in Mad Magazine.
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan has a good long-form version of applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task. Wikipedia summarises: “A small component on Salo’s spacecraft breaks and strands him here in the Solar System for over 200 millennia. He requests help from Tralfamadore, and his fellow Tralfamadorians respond by manipulating human history so that primitive humans evolve and create a civilization in order to produce the replacement part.”
How do you make a small fortune in folk music? First start with a large one.
I enjoyed that Steeleye Span video. I hadn’t been tracking down their videos like I have Fairport Convention and Malicorne. Sadly I have never seen Steeleye Span perform live, like I have Fairport Convention.
I was sure there would be an electric folk song by the title “Sax and Violins” but I can only find one by Talking Heads.
As far as the comic goes, it would have been quicker for the crook to just steal the guy’s credit card.
re “long-form version of applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task” — I agree the Vonnegut is the one to beat, but I’ve also enjoyed the bit in MAD’s parody of Robinson Crusoe where RC records in his diary the long effort of cutting down a huge tree, dragging it to his compound, planing it for many days, only to end with something like “By George — it was incredible, the work I had to go through to get a simple toothpick!”
Several degrees of separation: A friend of mine, Lizzie Hurtt, is the widow of Trevor Lucas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Lucas), and is the manager of both his and Sandy Denny’s estates.
Of course, I knew none of this when we became friends through our love of Airedales, Airedale Rescue and my Airedale YahooGroup (now .io group).
@ Shrug – “the work I had to go through to get a simple toothpick!” – There’s also a Harveytoon cartoon called Crazytown from somewhere in the 1950s with a similar idea: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQOcoWbd5Mc at 3:02 minutes in to see a large trunk whittled down to a toothpick by robot axes.
The rest of the film is similarly bonkers… a fish drives a car; a stork delivers parents to a baby’s house; boxers in the ring square up, only to watch the audience fight… That’s enough spoilers!
@ Grawlix – I saw Fairport Convention for the first time a couple of years ago, at Bath Forum. There were a couple of support acts I had not heard of, one of them Saving Grace doing their third live gig. Turned out it was Robert Plant’s latest venture – he and Dave Pegg from Fairport had been in a pre-Led Zep band called Way of Life in about 1966-7.
I saw Steeleye Span by accident in Bradford (Yorkshire) in 2002… I had been visiting my brother there and we went to the Topic folk club (my brother has been involved for some years, and got me to do the website http://www.topic-folk-club.org.uk/ from 2002 to now) and I entered the weekly raffle. The prize was a single ticket to see Steeleye Span the following night at St George’s Hall – a big venue in Bradford. I won and I went.
Well, Piraro’s weekly blog entry, which we were maybe expecting to add something to this discussion, and which we thought usually appears on Mondays, was this week dated yesterday (Tuesday) and was emailed today (Wednesday). Well! At https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2021/5/4/play-to-pay this Sunday Bizarro does appear; and there is a longish essay before he turns to brief comments on Wayno’s dailies; but the post doesn’t mention the comic directly, and afaict doesn’t have any bearing on it.
So the policy discussion of larK and Danny is in practice just moot!
BTW, his quickies on the Wayno dailies do include a point or two that we missed when some of them appeared in the Saturday OYs.
narmitaj – hmmm, the name Rupert Bear rings a bell at the back of my head. I am thinking I have at least something with him or a bear of him in my teddy bear (and friends) collection – possibly a book if not a bear.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Crook wants to rob the guy, but they guy has no money, just a credit card. Crook makes him buy a violin, then makes him practice for years until he’s good enough to make money while busking. Once he makes money, the crook steals the money and leaves.
A man gets robbed but has no cash, only a credit card.
He takes the robber with him to the music store and buys a violin with the credit card.
They go to the man’s home where he practices playing the violin.
They go back out on the street, where the man plays the violin and gets a tip.
The robber takes the tip and leaves.
@madmup: Beat me by one minute.
Because the only way that armed mugger could get his money was with violins.
I didn’t notice the man with a hat has a gun in his pocket until I read in the comments that he is a robber.
One odd thing – among many – is that the practice (or even learning*) session possibly only takes one night, from the evidence of the small largely non-coloured panelettes – they wear exactly the same clothes and hairstyles as through the window it goes from light to dark and dark back to light. But then the “Later…” panel is obviously years later – the robber is grey-haired and has a walking aide, the violinist has thinning, shorter hair.
*It seems likely that the victim has no ability in playing the violin, so the robber has to teach him from the start, or at least watch as he teaches himself. In which case, a bit of variety and the passage of time might have been better for the panelette section.
Presumably – unless by the end the robber has been leeching off his victim for many years and ‘0000s in notes – it would have been more efficient for the robber to make the guy buy something, such as the violin, then steal the and sell it. But that is only one step up from holding up someone and making them go to a cash point.
Idea Curtain, I almost missed your joke on violins/violence!
sheep, maybe that’s no gun in his pocket, he’s just glad … oh never mind
According to the comments on Piraro’s page, this does take place over a long period of time. Absurdist, I think is what he was getting at.
Andréa, you are finding this ahead of me! What “Piraro’s page” do you mean? The latest I’m finding is last week’s “tapping on the window” cartoon, at both https://www.facebook.com/bizarrocomics/ and https://www.bizarro.com/blog
I catch it here . . .
https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro
I asked:
What “Piraro’s page” do you mean? The latest I’m finding is last week’s “tapping on the window” cartoon, at both [Facebook] and [Bizarro blog]O, I C … Comments from vox pop at Comics Kingdom! https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2021-05-02#comic-comments . Well that’s cool, but not the word from the man.
And I liked seeing this: “St Louis Symphony’s instruments stolen…cops say it was a well orchestrated crime”
However, little patience for secret symbol fans documenting all the locations.
Oh, and nice to see our own Boise Ed in on the commenting there!
Ed, I think I saw someone here apparently agreeing with your “pawn ticket” theory. Did the Comics Kingdom commenters talk you out of that one, or are you sticking by it?
I looked for it on the Wayno site, but apparently he does not comment on the boss’s Sunday panels.
Actually he does, but as HIS blog comes out on Saturdays, it’ll be in his next one. Piraro’s blog usually comes out on Mondays; it’s not arrived in my mailbox yet.
I think theideacurtain has it, ie the joke element: robbery with violins.
1970s* English trad folk-rockers Steeleye Span had an instrumental track named that (though apparently the proper name of the track is Bank of Ireland)(Bank O’Violin… that pun sort of works). Here they are on Swiss TV in 1974 in a medley of that and a couple of other instrumentals. Long Hair! Weird Outfits! Double-necked Guitars!
The prancing woman in white is singer Maddy Prior, who obviously has no singing to do in an instrumental.
*They are still going, or at least were up until the pandemic. The last gig mentioned by their Wiki page was mid-Dec 2019. Their own site has prospective gig dates for 2021 and 2022, though some of the 21 dates are already rescheduled for 22.
For comics fans, of whom there must be many on this site, the Steeleye drummer is wearing the costume of Rubert Bear, a once-popular British cartoon character.
https://www.harringtonbooks.co.uk/pictures/53511.jpg?v=1554998325
Steeleye Span made a Terry Pratchett DiscWorld CD. “Wintersmith is the twenty-second studio album by British folk rock band Steeleye Span. It was released in October 2013. It features the line-up of Maddy Prior, Peter Knight, Rick Kemp, Julian Littman, Pete Zorn and Liam Genockey. Guest musicians are Terry Pratchett (voice), Kathryn Tickell (Northumbrian pipes), Bob Johnson (vocals), and John Spiers (melodeon).
The songs on the album were inspired principally by Wintersmith and other Discworld books featuring Tiffany Aching. There is a spoken contribution by the author, Terry Pratchett.”
‘Robbery with violins’ doesn’t work ’cause there is only one violin in the comic.
(Replying to Danny and Andréa) It looks to me like Wayno only mentions Piraro’s blog and Sunday strips. (Though he does show and comment on his own Saturday ones — it’s not a “weekend blackout” thing.)
Here is the relevant bit from the current Wayno Blog:
Thanks, as always, for checking in here at the old Waynoblog. Don't forget to visit Dan Piraro's blog to see what he has to say about these cartoons, and to admire his always-spectacular Bizarro Sunday page.Yes, Wayno’s blog comes out on Saturday, so if he were including or discussing a Sunday it probably would have to be the one from six days earlier, as
Andréa suggests. In this instance it would have been the tapping on the window one; but not in evidence. His link to Piraro’s Bizarro Blog is to top-level entry page, not to a dated post, so that avoids being specific and wrong.
I guess we’ll just have to wait ‘n’ see.
This is similar to the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon where Itchy ties Scratchy to railroad tracks and tries to get in a train to run him over but is booted out, so he enters engineering school and we see a montage of college life and graduation and he jumps in a train with his diploma and in the intervening years Scratchy has slowly worked on untying himself but still has his leg tangled.
Other commenters have got it, so I’ll just add an anecdote. I was in Kyiv, Ukraine, and while going through an underpass, a busker picked up his violin and started playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. It was bad that I briefly considered taking a few hryvnias from his case for my pain.
So we’ve given up CIDUBill’s policy that explanations from the cartoonists themselves are not sought, because they already had a chance to explain it in the making of the cartoon? I liked that policy, leads to more thoughtful discussion, and leads away from mere appeal to authority; ie: it builds good habits.
Well, there are degrees and circumstances.
After a substantial and productive discussion here, taking a look at a cartoonist’s well-established blog and picking up possible helpful cues seems pretty mild. It’s not like writing to them with “Oh please help us, we’re puzzled by your work and would like to sidle up and ask you”.
‘-)
“And that’s how I met… your mugger.”
Any working musician will tell you that there are many more efficient ways of raising money. In fact just about any other career brings in money more efficiently than playing music.
Like stealing the violin and selling it.
Applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task is classic comedy. I give you Laurel and Hardy in “The Music Box”, Rube Goldberg’s machines, and Spy vs. Spy in Mad Magazine.
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan has a good long-form version of applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task. Wikipedia summarises: “A small component on Salo’s spacecraft breaks and strands him here in the Solar System for over 200 millennia. He requests help from Tralfamadore, and his fellow Tralfamadorians respond by manipulating human history so that primitive humans evolve and create a civilization in order to produce the replacement part.”
How do you make a small fortune in folk music? First start with a large one.
I enjoyed that Steeleye Span video. I hadn’t been tracking down their videos like I have Fairport Convention and Malicorne. Sadly I have never seen Steeleye Span perform live, like I have Fairport Convention.
I was sure there would be an electric folk song by the title “Sax and Violins” but I can only find one by Talking Heads.
As far as the comic goes, it would have been quicker for the crook to just steal the guy’s credit card.
re “long-form version of applying disproportionate time or effort to a straightforward task” — I agree the Vonnegut is the one to beat, but I’ve also enjoyed the bit in MAD’s parody of Robinson Crusoe where RC records in his diary the long effort of cutting down a huge tree, dragging it to his compound, planing it for many days, only to end with something like “By George — it was incredible, the work I had to go through to get a simple toothpick!”
Several degrees of separation: A friend of mine, Lizzie Hurtt, is the widow of Trevor Lucas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Lucas), and is the manager of both his and Sandy Denny’s estates.
Of course, I knew none of this when we became friends through our love of Airedales, Airedale Rescue and my Airedale YahooGroup (now .io group).
@ Shrug – “the work I had to go through to get a simple toothpick!” – There’s also a Harveytoon cartoon called Crazytown from somewhere in the 1950s with a similar idea: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQOcoWbd5Mc at 3:02 minutes in to see a large trunk whittled down to a toothpick by robot axes.
The rest of the film is similarly bonkers… a fish drives a car; a stork delivers parents to a baby’s house; boxers in the ring square up, only to watch the audience fight… That’s enough spoilers!
@ Grawlix – I saw Fairport Convention for the first time a couple of years ago, at Bath Forum. There were a couple of support acts I had not heard of, one of them Saving Grace doing their third live gig. Turned out it was Robert Plant’s latest venture – he and Dave Pegg from Fairport had been in a pre-Led Zep band called Way of Life in about 1966-7.
I saw Steeleye Span by accident in Bradford (Yorkshire) in 2002… I had been visiting my brother there and we went to the Topic folk club (my brother has been involved for some years, and got me to do the website http://www.topic-folk-club.org.uk/ from 2002 to now) and I entered the weekly raffle. The prize was a single ticket to see Steeleye Span the following night at St George’s Hall – a big venue in Bradford. I won and I went.
Well, Piraro’s weekly blog entry, which we were maybe expecting to add something to this discussion, and which we thought usually appears on Mondays, was this week dated yesterday (Tuesday) and was emailed today (Wednesday). Well! At https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2021/5/4/play-to-pay this Sunday Bizarro does appear; and there is a longish essay before he turns to brief comments on Wayno’s dailies; but the post doesn’t mention the comic directly, and afaict doesn’t have any bearing on it.
So the policy discussion of larK and Danny is in practice just moot!
BTW, his quickies on the Wayno dailies do include a point or two that we missed when some of them appeared in the Saturday OYs.
narmitaj – hmmm, the name Rupert Bear rings a bell at the back of my head. I am thinking I have at least something with him or a bear of him in my teddy bear (and friends) collection – possibly a book if not a bear.