Is this a Noah’s Ark joke? Is there a missing caption? Are they checking the Alaska cruise schedule to see when the tourists with food will arrive? I can’t bear not understanding this.
The joke in this bear comic is clear — the confusing thing is that it appeared December 29. Given that timing, a better punch line would be “Go to sleep. It’s December 29 already!”
Comics I Don't Understand 
The two bears in the cave are planning to survive the flood on the Ark.
The big hole in Noah’s Ark, or rather in the story, is not so much how were all those creatures accommodated. We know Noah was selective, because you’ve never seen a unicorn to this very day. The hole in the story is how were they fed? Are those bears counting on consuming their fellow passengers?
ootenaboot — if Noah really did take termites, the story wouldn’t be the only thing with a hole in it.
ootenaboot – feeding bears could be accomplished by them hibernating during the cruise. The thing that always bugged me (heh) is the parasites and diseases. Three species of lice live only on humans. If Noah and the other seven had all shaved, we wouldn’t have a lice problem. And then there are the sexually-transmitted diseases, which means that at least some of Noah’s children must have been unfaithful, to catch the diseases, and then later they had encounters with their own nieces/nephews in order to preserve those diseases and ensure they survived.
There were eight people on the Ark?
Also, just today there was another Ark joke, in <i>Rubes</i>. What I suspect is a dung beetle is holding a book called “Noah’s Ark” and telling three youngsters “and there was an all-you-can-eat buffet of biblical proportions.”
There actually is a company called Ark Cruises. I don’t know if the cartoon is referring to them, but it’s at least as likely as a Bible reference.
https://www.theark.cruises/en
There are no unicorns today because they were playing silly games and missed the boat.
Grawlix, I remember a song long ago giving that explanation for the absence of unicorns today.
Grawlix, I remember a song long ago giving that explanation for the absence of unicorns today. Indeed, the explanation includes the “playing silly games” element that Grawlix includes.
Here are the Irish Rovers.
This Ark talk reminds me of a children’s book I liked, The Log of the Ark by Kenneth Walker and illustrated by Geoffrey Boumphrey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Log_of_the_Ark
All the antediluvian animals were originally grass-eaters, and on board have to learn to eat porridge and treacle, but the sinister Loathsome Scub introduces evil to the happy ship and at the end in the New World the creatures are now divided into predators and prey.
Along the way various other creatures disappear, not just the Unicorns: refreshing my memory from tWikipedia and other online sources, the Seventy-sevenses were very shy mammals, named after their cabin number, who abandon the Ark on a raft because they find it too oppressive; and the Clidders, who melted into puddles in all the new-fangled rain.
I’ve just gone and ordered an old hardback copy (with dustjacket) from Abebooks (I read it hasn’t been reprinted since the 1970s). My older brother has the original family volume.
Back more on topic, I saw a recent online cartoon with Noah being upbraided for organising the animals alphabetically, which causes at least one disaster. However, the illustration shows signs for ANTS (gone), then ANTEATERS and half out of frame ANTELOPES. In the plural form the ants should be safe from the anteaters, or at least separated from them (though the cartoon would have worked with ANT, ANTEATER and ANTELOPE).
boise ed – Genesis 7:13 reads ‘On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.’ Four men, four women, totals eight. (There’s no indication in the story that any of the sons were polygynous, and Noah’s wife is always singular.)
Noye’s Fludde (Noah’s Flood) was the subject of a Medieval miracle play which Benjamin Britten turned into an opera. It is frequently performed in England, and in Anglican and Episcopal churches in America that are located near community music schools. Noah’s wife and her friends provide the comic relief. https://youtu.be/kUk_nNULRJY?si=avpmSgwooDR1vyqH
Just this year for the first time I watched online a full production of Britten’s Noyes Fludde — very interesting. But previously I had seen parts included in the Wes Anderson movie Moonrise Kingdom, where the story includes people involved in a performance.
I grew up listening to the Irish Rovers with my parents. It was much later that I found the Unicorn song was penned by Shel Silverstein. He was one busy writer.
What is amazing is that Noah’s wife did not need to bring her mother along, nor did Noah. And since life was different back then – he did not have any other wives.
And based on the bears in my teddy (and other bears) collection – they like to be with their den and not out on their own. :-)
@Meryl A: Bears come out of their den when today is the day the teddy bears have their picnic.
@ MiB (16) – I had a lot of trouble finding a satisfactory audio clip of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”. Most of the videos were loaded with annoying still shots of ugly stuffed animals, and included endless instrumental sequences. The best one turned out to be this version by Bing Crosby.
P.S. A different video showed a Bing Crosby 78rpm record playing on an ancient machine, but the turntable wasn’t properly calibrated (it was running much too slow), which ruined the sound quality.
P.S. Here is the “Rubes” that Boise Ed mentioned @5:
P.P.S. Nobody has mentioned that “June Bear”, and none of the comments that I’ve seen elsewhere objected to or even noticed the awkward publishing date. I’m not sure whether it would work better if published in June (or any other month), and I suspect that the best solution would have been to avoid mentioning a specific month in the dialog.
Actually the best “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” is Henry Hall’s 1932 recording: https://youtu.be/dZANKFxrcKU?si=IiuI0f2-aNrGLeq7
That Henry Hall recording of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” is good, but I prefer the felison brass at youtube.com/watch?v=q4eOukqLR3s. But the best I ever heard was by a Bay Area vocal trio called Oak, Ash, & Thorn in the 1970s-1980s. (I found an unsatisfactory recording online from Cliggo Music, under their name, but don’t judge them by that.)
I have hundreds of bears in our house – teddy, koala, panda, black, brown, etc. They range in size from 1/4 inch tall (the most recent addition – small plastic one we bought we bought on a quick day trip to Lancaster, PA for a whopping 54 cents including sales tax (amazing how much detail they can get in something that small), to one about 2.5 to 3 ft tall of the mascot of the 1980 Olympics in USSR/Russia They are stuffed bears, porcelain, plastic, metal, wood, toy telephone…
Husband has some bears also that he has bought over the years also.
This started by a joke – when I was in college I lived at home. A friend, Jill, who was in my “house plan” (similar to a sorority but has British town names instead of Greek names and no pledging, just join – and no “house” at least not at our college) lived in the dorms. I had a car, but parents did not like 17/18 year old me (freshman year) out alone at night driving. So when something was going on off campus at night I would drive us there and back and sleep over on the floor of her room – she had a bear named Pierre and I started bringing this bear that was lying around my (parents’) house to keep Pierre company while we were out. He got named Theodore Bear – and from him the entire collection sprung.