Was this deliberate?


In this cartoon, we have the somewhat disconcerting idea of the character Pig planning to eat a ham sandwich. I wonder if cartoonist Stephan Pastis made a deliberate choice because the. strip is quirky, or whether a ham sandwich just happened to come to mind because it is such a ubiquitous banal food choice and these are cartoon creatures after all.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Comments

  1. John Morales says

    “Everywhere there’s lots of piggies living piggy lives
    You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives
    Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon”

  2. Rob Grigjanis says

    I suspect the intended humour (such as it might be, difficult to tell) lies in the notion that, in the future, Pig himself could be a ham sandwich.

  3. steve oberski says

    Perhaps it’s a “long pig” ham sandwich.

    I recall reading a science fiction short story a long time ago (Asimov, Heinlein ?) about vat grown meat and how the most popular type was human.

  4. Rob Grigjanis says

    John @2: I’ve always loved the irony of that song. The Beatles went from working class lads to super-rich consumers in the bat of an eyelid.

  5. says

    Never trust a pig who either eats or sells ham sandwiches.

    Oh, and @4: I remember a story by Arthur C. Clarke along those lines: at a time when no one ate real animal flesh and even disdained it as gross and barbaric, there was some kind of government inquiry into the suspicious popularity of one company’s vat-meat, maybe the threat of that company getting a monopoly; and one witness was leading up to a description of the devilishly-clever (and MAYBE illegal) secret to that company’s success.

  6. John Morales says

    Raging Bee, your #6 relates to steve’s #4.

    Rob, kinda sorta. They never were the starched-shirt types.

    Regarding the intended humour, I take it at its face; ridiculously short-term goals.
    However, unlike Mano, I think the ham reference is deliberate.
    Best humour works at multiple levels, from the sledgehammer obviousness to the sly allusion.
    The concept of “Pig himself could be a ham sandwich” doesn’t quite work for me, though the concept of Pig being the hamer rather than the hamee is drollish.

    (Excuse the neologisms)

  7. seachange says

    Very little about Pastis is funny to me.

    Because he isn’t all that funny and often not funny at all, my brain usually does its own thing when reading his stuff. My interpretation was much darker. Pig is not going to eat another pig. Pig is gonna eat himself. Therefore, a very *very* short term goal.

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