Over a year ago I posted a set of Non-Sequitur comics in which Wiley had repeated the exact same joke (including some lengthy dialog) in three different versions. The following examples from Tom Wilson’s “Ziggy” aren’t nearly as sophisticated, but the identical setups seem to show that the author has either forgotten the own material, or simply doesn’t care (“…just run it again, readers will never remember it…”)
All three of these were created by “Tom II” after his father retired, so it’s not a case of a legacy artist not knowing what the original author wrote: he did these all by himself.
Just three years later, with new artwork, but exactly the same joke, word for word:
Sixteen years after that, a new rendition (and now in color), but it’s still the same gag:
I’m sure that it is difficult (effectively impossible) to remember every single joke over a span of 18.5 years (and over 6800 comics), but insulting Ziggy as “shorty” is something of a running gag (besides these three, I ran into half a dozen other examples), so perhaps reviewing the GoComics archive might have been a good idea. That’s exactly why somebody has been going to all the trouble of making sure that the dialog is included in the GC index.
Comics I Don't Understand 
“…just run it again, readers will never remember it…”
They don’t know about us, do they.
Who reads Ziggy enough to notice?
😛
Back when I was still following the usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips one contributor spend a lot of time tracking reuse of Family Circus strips. Frequently, this was a the same drawing with a few tweaks, like Thel’s hair, and occasional dialog changes.
When I was young, I had a Ziggy compilation book — I think it was Ziggy Faces Life. And in that book, there were a couple of examples of Tom Wilson re-using substantially the same joke, albeit with slightly different dialogue. Example: In one panel, Ziggy meets with a bank loan officer and says, “I’d like to buy some groceries.” Somewhere else in the book, Ziggy meets with a bank loan officer and says, “I’d like to buy some stamps.”
@ Dana (1) – GoComics doesn’t show any comments for the second one, but that’s to be expected, since virtually nobody was reading comics online back then. (The GC archive for Ziggy was probably created retroactively.)
P.S. @ Grawlix (2) – I discovered the first two panels by accident (they appeared when I was hunting for something else), but even the minimal research for this post was more Ziggy than I ever wanted to read: never again!
P.P.S. @ Joshua (4) – My wife (who works at a bank in Berlin) had a colleague at another branch who was approached by a customer carrying a pair of slacks, who asked how long it would take to have them dry cleaned. The bank employee replied that they would be ready by Monday, took the pants, waited for the customer to leave, and then dashed next door to the dry cleaners. Sure enough, the customer returned to the bank on Monday, paid for and received his pants, and only then was he informed, “By the way, this is a bank. Next time, please go to the dry cleaners next door.” Ooops. 🙂
In Post Offices in the UK you can do a lot of banking-like work, especially with rural branches of banks closing down. You can also drop off clothes to be dry-cleaned.
I saw a good “misunderstood purpose of this office” story online once (and I hope it is true)… a woman dropped her dog off at a company under the mistaken belief it was a doggy-daycare establishment. In fact, it was a normal business, just one where employees were allowed or indeed encouraged to bring along their own dogs. The staff were happy to add another to the clan.
Narmitaj and Kilby, nice examples of that genre you describe as “misunderstood purpose of this office” jokes. I can’t remember the probably off-color setup for one that’s going around these days and ends up with “But sir, this is a Wendy’s!” (or another fast-food place).
However, that isn’t how I took Joshua’s two instances. Those seem to be saying “Life is so expensive nowadays, you need to take out a loan just to buy groceries!” , and then almost repeated with “stamps” as the inflated item.
Mitch, it started as “This is an Arby’s” back in 2011. Not really a punchline to anything, just context to show that the speaker is not in an appropriate place to be monologuing. Now it’s just a rejoinder to someone else whose lengthy rant should be taken someplace else. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sir-this-is-an-arbys
Thanks, Powers! Now that you’ve reminded us, I do think Arby’s sounds more familiar.
Each seems to be an update – office worker has a typewriter in the first strip, office worker has a computer in the second strip. By the third strip color has been discovered and it is no longer in black and white.
(Though, obviously color strips existed before computers came along.)