Thanks to “👓 caren” for sending it in, and saying “my friends and i have only the slightest idea what vic might have ingested to publish this… perhaps we need a little to understand it… :)”
This started out for me as simply a complete CIDU:
But a comment on the Comics Kingdom site clarified the basic “what’s going on, what’s the main intended joke?” issues: he’s lost his shot glass inside the patient.
But that just raises soooo many more new questions! Does the Assisting Surgeon (the person speaking) seriously think loss of the shot glass is the only reason the Surgeon is trying to recover it? Wouldn’t he be hugely in hot water when the glass shows up on some X-Ray someday? And what was a shot glass doing in the OR anyway? And did he seriously have just one good one, important enough to make a good birthday present?
Comics I Don't Understand 
I mean, the joke’s been explained. A lot of comics introduce implausible scenarios for comedic purposes, so I don’t know that analyzing the extent of the implausibility carries any benefit.
@Powers: but if it’s too dumb it’s not close to funny. “Watch” would have been funnier IMHO. “Shot glass”, “hamster”, “barbell”, not so much…which doesn’t mean you’re not wrong that that’s all there is!
I do see the tension there. What do you think of those collections of “oopses and near-misses and inexplicable but irrelevant details” that we’ve experimented with? Originally I was thinking of this to anchor another set of those. But there is a difficult line – we don’t want to get purely negative, but it is so inviting sometimes to give in to “Sure it’s a CIDU – I Don’t Understand how anyone could consider this funny!”
@Mitch4 Hope I didn’t stray too far into the negative. I’d hope/think that “OK, we’ve figured out what they were going for but we think they missed the mark” is OK but perhaps we don’t want to go there.
I like the idea of near-misses.
No worries, PS3. I was acknowledging Powers’s point, and perhaps taking it too far as saying once we’ve put our finger on the intent, and the basic problem, further talk about the problems is just critical in perhaps a too negative spirit.
That must have been some party!
Maybe the patient used his shot glass and was a little too enthusiastic, and swallowed the shot with glass and all, and this guy, desperate to get it back, decided to do some impromptu surgery, and his assistants are his friends from the party, and they think they’ve done all they can, the shot glass is gone, so how to talk him down? Promise to buy him a new one if he’ll relent and give up. Yeah, a stretch, but slightly more plausible that they magically whip out an entire OR to go hunting for the glass than that a shot glass just happens to be present at an OR, and that any assistant would suggest giving up the hunt for the glass under those circumstances….
My Thoughts:
The idea of losing a shot class in a body is not supposed to be plausible, In fact its purpose is to be barely thinkable so brains scurry around looking for another scenario for the extended amount of time required to get the biggest inner chuckle when the reader accepts the situation as the same that might happen at home. Then the brain starts bouncing between the truth of the situation, the implausibility of it, and “what the heck could have been going on here?”.
That said, I agree that a shot glass made this very tough and the thought “not funny” also appeared in my head very early.
However, given the familiarity with the meme shown in the comments, I think that the artist intended this stretch to BE over-the-top and that that is the bit of humor Vic Lee intended. a parody of humor. I feel I may never forget the set-up because I had to think so hard about it.
The “MyThoughts:” comment, that went immediately into moderation, was from me, “Kevin A” (not “Kevin”)
[I used to write to Bill immediately when I’d do something like that; he’d fix it quickly and I’d feel special got a personal fixed-it note from him..]
@Kevin A, feel free to use the submissions address — cidu dot submissions at gmail dot com — as a working address for the editors for matters of all sorts, not just comics being sent in.
(Meanwhile I am changing your name on the other comment, admittedly not seamless.)
P.S. Thanks for that comment on the Pardon!
@Mitch4 Thanks! I sort of panicked not wanting to attach some fellow’s good name to my over-edited opinion.