2010-01-24
Original: 2010-01-24 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1 (single panel):
A man and a woman sit together at a desk in front of laptops.
Man: I worry the internet turns art into memetic reductions. I mean, if they were published today, how would we respond to Shakespeare's HAMLET? To Voltaire's CANDIDE? To Nabokov's LOLITA?
Woman: Pfft. That's easy. Here, I'll email you.
Below the panel, three emoticons appear, presumably the woman's emailed "reductions" of the three works:
:( :) :/
Votey:
A hand-drawn box labeled "CATCH-22" at the top. Below it, a sleeping-face text emoticon:
(-.-)zzz...
A man and a woman sit together at a desk in front of laptops.
Man: I worry the internet turns art into memetic reductions. I mean, if they were published today, how would we respond to Shakespeare's HAMLET? To Voltaire's CANDIDE? To Nabokov's LOLITA?
Woman: Pfft. That's easy. Here, I'll email you.
Below the panel, three emoticons appear, presumably the woman's emailed "reductions" of the three works:
:( :) :/
Votey:
A hand-drawn box labeled "CATCH-22" at the top. Below it, a sleeping-face text emoticon:
(-.-)zzz...
Alt text
A single-panel SMBC comic. A man and a red-haired woman sit side by side at a desk with laptops. The man frets in a speech caption: "I worry the internet turns art into memetic reductions. I mean, if they were published today, how would we respond to Shakespeare's HAMLET? To Voltaire's CANDIDE? To Nabokov's LOLITA?" The woman, smiling, replies: "Pfft. That's easy. Here, I'll email you." Beneath the panel are her three replies as bare emoticons: a frowning ":(" for tragic Hamlet, a smiling ":)" for optimistic Candide, and an ambivalent ":/" for Lolita. The joke: great literature reduced to single-emoticon memes. Votey (bonus panel): a small framed box labeled "CATCH-22" with a sleeping emoticon below it, "(-.-)zzz..." reducing Catch-22 to a dozing face.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.