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A novice cartoonist, Bob Mankoff, has drawn a married couple on a couch floating down a river, seemingly unaware that they\u2019re headed toward the edge of a waterfall. The wife is calmly addressing her husband, who\u2019s reading the paper.<\/p>\nA novice cartoonist, Bob Mankoff, has drawn a married couple on a couch floating down a river, seemingly unaware that they\u2019re headed toward the edge of a waterfall. The wife is calmly addressing her husband, who\u2019s reading the paper.<\/p>\n
I initially thought this couple, just seconds before their untimely end, might be oblivious enough to be discussing another couple who died unexpectedly: \u201cShame about the Johnsons. They never saw it coming.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Then I imagined some person, just out of frame, desperately trying to warn the blissfully unaware couple about the coming disaster:<\/p>\n I then imagined the oblivious couple struggling to hear each other over the thunderous roar of the crashing water: \u201cYou\u2019ll have to speak up.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n I then went in the other direction and imagined that the couple knows exactly what is happening. Maybe they\u2019re resigned to their fate: \u201cWe\u2019re not oblivious. We\u2019re accepting.<\/strong>\u201d Perhaps they\u2019re concerned: \u201cWell, maybe we shouldn\u2019t just go with the flow.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n They should be panicking, so I tried to imagine why they look so serene:<\/p>\n I then focused on the fact that the man is reading a newspaper (something people used to actually do) but unaware of the impending disaster: \u201cJust because you read the paper doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re informed.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Although this couple has every reason to be anxious, the woman might be attributing her husband\u2019s anxiety to the news reports he\u2019s reading in the paper. That possibility led to, \u201cYou\u2019d be less anxious if you stopped reading the paper.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, I took a morbid and politically-incorrect approach. I imagined the couple experiencing a variation on the long disbanded Eskimo practice (the last reported case was in 1939) of putting elders on ice floes to die:<\/p>\n Senilicide (the murder of old people) seems like a fitting note on which to end my section of this commentary, so let\u2019s see what you came up with.<\/p>\n Like I did, several of you focused on the fact that the husband is reading the paper. The best of these captions included:<\/p>\n Many of you used a standard comment that took on an entirely new meaning in the context of the drawing. I especially liked,<\/p>\n There were many entries premised on the idea that the husband hears the crashing water but can\u2019t identify its source. Here are the best two:<\/p>\n That last caption works not only for Mankoff\u2019s drawing but as an allusion to this classic New Yorker cartoon by James Thurber:<\/p>\n A couple of you used an alternate meaning of the word \u201cfalls\u201d to reference a common fear for older people:<\/p>\n The second caption is clever but doesn\u2019t work because it presumes the husband is speaking, which he\u2019s not. It highlights, therefore, one of the most common captioning errors: failing to properly identify the character who\u2019s speaking.<\/p>\n There were many references to Niagara Falls. Here are the best two (and I did not include any of the countless Viagra jokes):<\/p>\n As someone who attended law school at SUNY Buffalo\u2014the Harvard of Western New York, just seventeen miles from the Falls\u2014I especially liked that last caption. And yes, the Canadian side is better.<\/p>\n Many captions focused on the couch, and these were especially good:<\/p>\n Several of you imagined that the couch was not the only, but just the next, living room fixture to go over the falls:<\/p>\n A clever variation on this concept imagines that other couples have, like the one on the couch, been swept away in the current and will soon go over the edge of the waterfall: \u201cLook, the Joneses are trying to keep up.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Similar to but better than my \u201clook out\u201d captions, which assume someone just out of frame is trying to warn the couple about the waterfall, was this entry: \u201cThey\u2019re still waving their arms.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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