This is a CIDU-Oy — is the joke merely in the polysemy of places? Or is there something special about the named cities, like if they all have Marathons and that’s how somebody is likely to break a leg?? Or nothing more? I don’t understand!
Saturday Morning OYs – December 9th, 2023
Comics I Don't Understand 
Well, they’re 3 places I’ve been….
The Dadvent Calendar maybe would work better as one of those Bingo Card jokes / remarks that have become popular in the past few years.
I think “Akron” demonstrates that they are simply three random place names, selected only because they are sufficiently well-known, and widely separated from one another. If the author were implying a sports-related injury, then he would probably have dressed the man correspondingly, and selected clearly associated cities (football: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Green Bay; or hockey: Boston, Toronto, Vancouver).
P.S. @ Dana – I think you are right that reversing the logistics might have made it work better, but when I looked it up, I was surprised to discover that “buzzword bingo” is over three decades old:
No one’s mentioned the obvious: Breaking a leg in three places usually means three places on the leg have been broken.
Well okay, @dansachs#####, it may deserve explicit mention. But I suspect people were already taking it for granted as part of the joke. Notice the posting mentioning the ambiguity of the word “places”.
The Hoosier Hot Shots: She Broke My Heart in Three Places (Seattle, Chicago and New York).
The old joke from ‘Hee Haw’ was…
P. Doc, I broke my leg in three places!
D. You need to stay away from them places.
MiB, good find!
From Ulysses:
MiB (6): Thanks from me, too. I see that is from Swing in the Saddle, a 1944 American Western musical comedy film. I love watching those old movies that were primarily there to showcase bands or other musicians. Now I’ll have to spend an hour or so on this one!
Mitch4 (9): Thanks for the reminder of why I never paid any attention to Joyce. I’ve sometimes wondered how he ever got a publisher’s interest.
@ Boise Ed (10) – He must have found an editor with the same oddball, long-winded sense of humor that he had. I’ve never cared for it; I had any possible remaining interest in “stream of consciousness” narrative burned away by “The Sound and the Fury” in high school.
“Ulysses” was originally published in parts in a magazine. Although there is a narrative of things that happen in one day, it probably doesn’t matter in what order anyone reads the parts.
The Smithsonian Magazine recently reported about a book club that was reading “Finnegans Wake“, and took 28 years to finish it. The most horrific detail was the final sentence of the article: “The novel’s final line — ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the…’ — cuts off mid-sentence, and scholars say it’s meant to continue into the book’s first line.“