🫘 TREE 767: How to be a genius
A surefire way to ruin a joke it to explain it. Here I go anyway.
A normal situation, a woman leaves a note for a man explaining the feeding he needs to do,
is delivered with perfect clarity – the tin and opener on the counter, the underlined text in the speech bubble confirming to us that he is reading a note
which is where the situation goes weird because the food isn’t for a pet,
it’s for the shadow people.
This would have been enough for most folks: ‘Put out five helpings of casserole for the shadow people’ is perfectly amusing,
but Josh Mecouch didn’t stop with enough. He decided that the shadow people in Carol’s house would live on beans because a) beans are objectively funny, b) beans on their own are bland (Do the shadow people want plain beans or are they tolerating them because they have no other options?), c) beans in a tin reinforce the visual side of the gag, and d) shadow farts.
And surely this abundance of absurdity is enough to enthral the Pants Pants fans of the world.
Josh Mecouch isn’t sure,
and so the beans shall be served on the least appropriate bean vessel in the kitchen:
a tray.
The tray is what makes takes this cartoon from wonderful to exceptional genius.
One tray of plain beans carried carefully across the room to five shadow people because Carol signed her note with two hugs and two kisses and there may be more where that came from when she gets home by seven.
Genius comes through observation and practice.
Grow slowly
Jeff