Not A Blog™

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This has happened to everyone. You tell a joke, it falls flat. But I think it happens to me more often than most people. The problem is that I’m always trying to be much too clever for casual conversations, and so I end up pulling out these oblique references that nobody can relate to. The comic here is almost word-for-word of an actual conversation I had. It happened exactly as shown. The subject of the movie 300 came up and someone asked where it came from. It all went downhill from there.

I remembered this failed joke in particular because I thought it was really good. Seriously! Okay, you’re talking about some art—which the art itself is a copy of another piece of art—but it’s art that relates to Greece! If you don’t know your Greek philosophy (don’t feel bad: no one in that group I was talking to knew it, either, evidently), Plato wrote in his Republic that artists were the worst kind of people because they created copies of real world objects which were, themselves, copies of an ideal. Okay, so it’s not hilarious—but it can be appreciated.

But, no kidding, exactly like in the comic, as soon as I busted out the reference: dead silence. Then someone changed the subject to whether or not one of the other guys had gotten a Nintendo DS, which he had mentioned he was going to purchase in some earlier conversation.

I tried to illustrate a variety of expressions for the pause, to convey the full force of the ensuing awkwardness. It’s really hard to draw expressions, but they turned out alright. I think the closest to reality, however, is my expression in the last panel. I did stare down to the left, confused and slightly dejected, but trying not to show it.

Regardless, it’s still a good joke!

-Pulsar