I understand what the chicken is saying, I just don’t understand why it is supposed to be funny:
No entiendo lo que dice la gallina, y todavía no entiendo por qué se supone que es gracioso:
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I think the bar before the last frame gives it away – he’s looking at himself in a mirror.
I would put forth an alternative: I thought the narration was coming from the author (or possibly even the audience).
I agree with Powers that the chicken isn’t the narrator. I think it’s kind of funny as an anti-joke: You expect a four-panel gag and get an absurd bit with no punchline. Something that Monty Python or Andy Kaufman might have done if they were cartoonists.
Having observed the behavior of a few caged birds (not held captive by me) I think Mark H. has it.
If he was staring into a mirror, wouldn’t the last panel show his not-hair going in the opposite direction? (Sorry, the word for the not-hair escapes me, at least until I hit ‘send’.)
I get into ridiculous staring contests with my dog all the time. With a strange chicken? Sure. Why not?
Why the Spanish version, saying the opposite thing? The English says “I understand what the chicken is saying …” and the Spanish says “I don’t understand …”
@ Boise Ed (7) – Nice to see that someone noticed. I took a few years of Spanish in high school, and while I still can sometimes puzzle out a bit of text, the vocabulary in the second and third panels surpassed my limited abilities.
Talking about a mirror for a bird always reminds me of the sentient parrot in the comic strip Monty. I think that parrot would turn up here from time to time. Anyway, Monty puts a mirror in the parrot’s cage. After a few days, the parrot complains “I don’t like my new roommate. He’s always staring at me!”
Re: the parrot in Monty: It is kind of backwards, since recognizing yourself in a mirror is a supposed test for sentience, and parrots are one of the few animals who pass it…
larK: Interesting. I don’t know about parrots, but based on my experience, paraKEETs (budgies) don’t recognize themselves in a mirror.
@ MiB (9) – Monty’s parrot and the mirror seems to be a not infrequent running gag. I wasn’t able to find precisely the example you quoted, but there were plenty of others:
… I have no idea whether the parrot might have appeared before the strip was renamed to “Monty”, but this example (just a few months after the name change) seems to show that the idea was not new at that point:
And apparently I was wrong. I just read up on it in Wikipedia, and according to the article, the grey parrot specifically fails the mirror test. So far the only birds that pass it are Eurasian magpies, though a more recent study failed to confirm the earlier study’s findings; and pigeons after some preliminary training can pass the test.
I specifically thought grey parrots had passed the test, but that is incorrect. I also thought that dogs had passed, and that is wrong, and that cats didn’t pass, but then further study showed that cats just weren’t interested in participating, and might well pass, but I found no information to back that up, either. So my grasp on facts seems pretty shaky; I must remember to confirm my notions more regularly.
In an interesting (to me at least!) anecdote, when we were kids playing with stuffed animals, my sister and I had the conceit that the stuffed animals were too dumb to recognize themselves in the mirror and that they thought, almost exactly like the parrot in Monty, that the reflection was a Friend. It strikes me that at age 8, I seemed to be protesting a bit too much in my security that I at least understood that the mirror was my reflection. (Though I have clear memories of talking to myself in front of a mirror back to at least age 4, and probably much earlier, pointing out specifics of my anatomy to myself: I was particularly interested in the inside of my mouth and under my tongue, where some white colored tissue I told myself was milk — a secret discovery only I knew about!)
My experience with cats & mirrors, and the witness of many Internet videos, is generally that on first exposures a cat will treat its reflection as a possible enemy; but after getting used to the mirror, just treating the mirror as the physical object it is.
No access to an archive of Robotman?
One of my cats (they are brothers) loves the mirror and alternately looks behind it to see who is there or turning around to chase his toy when he realizes that it’s not in the mirror. The other tried to touch paws with his reflection a couple of times and now ignores it completely.
@ deety (15) – The “Monty” archive at GoComics has nothing before April 2001. Searching for “Robotman” produces just this one “Betty” strip from 1997:
Re: “mirrors” – Some ten or fifteen years ago I happened to catch approximately the second half of a “documentary” of an experiment done with a two or three year old boy. Up until the film was made, the parents had managed to raise this kid without any mirrors anywhere in their house. They set up a video camera to record the events, placed a large mirror at floor level, and let the kid discover it. I missed the “first contact” scene, but from what I can recall, the kid was getting very frustrated with the “other boy”, and eventually gave up. Even if the results were fascinating, it seemed like an abusive trick to play on one own’s child.
Kilby (8), did someone change the Spanish strip here? Now, all panels are translated pretty accurately. Perhaps I was half asleep when I commented earlier.
@ Boise Ed (19) – i didn’t intend to confuse anyone, and there have been no changes to either strip, nor to my introductory lines. Not every Macanudo translation is perfect, but this one is of the same high quality that we have come to expect (I’m starting to think that the translator should get equal billing with Liniers on the English strips).
All I was trying to say with the second introduction is that I was unable to understand the Spanish dialog without help. If you plug it into a translator, the result is nearly an exact match with the English version.
But after all of that, I still don’t think this strip is “funny”, it’s just “weird”.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think the bar before the last frame gives it away – he’s looking at himself in a mirror.
I would put forth an alternative: I thought the narration was coming from the author (or possibly even the audience).
I agree with Powers that the chicken isn’t the narrator. I think it’s kind of funny as an anti-joke: You expect a four-panel gag and get an absurd bit with no punchline. Something that Monty Python or Andy Kaufman might have done if they were cartoonists.
Having observed the behavior of a few caged birds (not held captive by me) I think Mark H. has it.
If he was staring into a mirror, wouldn’t the last panel show his not-hair going in the opposite direction? (Sorry, the word for the not-hair escapes me, at least until I hit ‘send’.)
I get into ridiculous staring contests with my dog all the time. With a strange chicken?
Sure. Why not?
Why the Spanish version, saying the opposite thing? The English says “I understand what the chicken is saying …” and the Spanish says “I don’t understand …”
@ Boise Ed (7) – Nice to see that someone noticed. I took a few years of Spanish in high school, and while I still can sometimes puzzle out a bit of text, the vocabulary in the second and third panels surpassed my limited abilities.
Talking about a mirror for a bird always reminds me of the sentient parrot in the comic strip Monty. I think that parrot would turn up here from time to time. Anyway, Monty puts a mirror in the parrot’s cage. After a few days, the parrot complains “I don’t like my new roommate. He’s always staring at me!”
Re: the parrot in Monty: It is kind of backwards, since recognizing yourself in a mirror is a supposed test for sentience, and parrots are one of the few animals who pass it…
larK: Interesting. I don’t know about parrots, but based on my experience, paraKEETs (budgies) don’t recognize themselves in a mirror.
@ MiB (9) – Monty’s parrot and the mirror seems to be a not infrequent running gag. I wasn’t able to find precisely the example you quoted, but there were plenty of others:
…
I have no idea whether the parrot might have appeared before the strip was renamed to “Monty”, but this example (just a few months after the name change) seems to show that the idea was not new at that point:
And apparently I was wrong. I just read up on it in Wikipedia, and according to the article, the grey parrot specifically fails the mirror test. So far the only birds that pass it are Eurasian magpies, though a more recent study failed to confirm the earlier study’s findings; and pigeons after some preliminary training can pass the test.
I specifically thought grey parrots had passed the test, but that is incorrect. I also thought that dogs had passed, and that is wrong, and that cats didn’t pass, but then further study showed that cats just weren’t interested in participating, and might well pass, but I found no information to back that up, either. So my grasp on facts seems pretty shaky; I must remember to confirm my notions more regularly.
In an interesting (to me at least!) anecdote, when we were kids playing with stuffed animals, my sister and I had the conceit that the stuffed animals were too dumb to recognize themselves in the mirror and that they thought, almost exactly like the parrot in Monty, that the reflection was a Friend. It strikes me that at age 8, I seemed to be protesting a bit too much in my security that I at least understood that the mirror was my reflection. (Though I have clear memories of talking to myself in front of a mirror back to at least age 4, and probably much earlier, pointing out specifics of my anatomy to myself: I was particularly interested in the inside of my mouth and under my tongue, where some white colored tissue I told myself was milk — a secret discovery only I knew about!)
My experience with cats & mirrors, and the witness of many Internet videos, is generally that on first exposures a cat will treat its reflection as a possible enemy; but after getting used to the mirror, just treating the mirror as the physical object it is.
No access to an archive of Robotman?
One of my cats (they are brothers) loves the mirror and alternately looks behind it to see who is there or turning around to chase his toy when he realizes that it’s not in the mirror. The other tried to touch paws with his reflection a couple of times and now ignores it completely.
@ deety (15) – The “Monty” archive at GoComics has nothing before April 2001. Searching for “Robotman” produces just this one “Betty” strip from 1997:
Re: “mirrors” – Some ten or fifteen years ago I happened to catch approximately the second half of a “documentary” of an experiment done with a two or three year old boy. Up until the film was made, the parents had managed to raise this kid without any mirrors anywhere in their house. They set up a video camera to record the events, placed a large mirror at floor level, and let the kid discover it. I missed the “first contact” scene, but from what I can recall, the kid was getting very frustrated with the “other boy”, and eventually gave up. Even if the results were fascinating, it seemed like an abusive trick to play on one own’s child.
Kilby (8), did someone change the Spanish strip here? Now, all panels are translated pretty accurately. Perhaps I was half asleep when I commented earlier.
@ Boise Ed (19) – i didn’t intend to confuse anyone, and there have been no changes to either strip, nor to my introductory lines. Not every Macanudo translation is perfect, but this one is of the same high quality that we have come to expect (I’m starting to think that the translator should get equal billing with Liniers on the English strips).
All I was trying to say with the second introduction is that I was unable to understand the Spanish dialog without help. If you plug it into a translator, the result is nearly an exact match with the English version.
But after all of that, I still don’t think this strip is “funny”, it’s just “weird”.