the-rub
Original: the-rub on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Man (with light hair): Sometimes I wish you could just get Shakespeare in plain modern language, so you can tell what's going on.
Woman (with dark curly hair): Are you crazy? Have you read this stuff?
Panel 2 (the woman recites, with the text shown above her in a banner):
Woman: "To die, to sleep; / To sleep perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause—there's the respect / That makes calamity of so long life."
Panel 3:
Woman: Do you know what "the rub" is? It's a lumpy patch in a game called bowls.
Panel 4:
Woman: So, rephrasing, it's something like "Sure, I could end my suffering with death, but THE REAL BUMP IN THE BOWLING ALLEY is maybe after death everything sucks too."
Panel 5 (silhouettes of the two figures standing in the dark):
Man: Wow, archaicism and complexity are doing some important work.
Woman: He literally wrote a whole sonnet about his dick and NOBODY NOTICES.
Votey:
Caption (handwritten, inside a hand-drawn box): (Sonnet 136 is the poetical equivalent of a dick pic)
Man (with light hair): Sometimes I wish you could just get Shakespeare in plain modern language, so you can tell what's going on.
Woman (with dark curly hair): Are you crazy? Have you read this stuff?
Panel 2 (the woman recites, with the text shown above her in a banner):
Woman: "To die, to sleep; / To sleep perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause—there's the respect / That makes calamity of so long life."
Panel 3:
Woman: Do you know what "the rub" is? It's a lumpy patch in a game called bowls.
Panel 4:
Woman: So, rephrasing, it's something like "Sure, I could end my suffering with death, but THE REAL BUMP IN THE BOWLING ALLEY is maybe after death everything sucks too."
Panel 5 (silhouettes of the two figures standing in the dark):
Man: Wow, archaicism and complexity are doing some important work.
Woman: He literally wrote a whole sonnet about his dick and NOBODY NOTICES.
Votey:
Caption (handwritten, inside a hand-drawn box): (Sonnet 136 is the poetical equivalent of a dick pic)
Alt text
A five-panel SMBC comic. A light-haired man tells a dark-haired curly-haired woman he wishes you could get Shakespeare in plain modern language so you could tell what's going on. She replies, "Are you crazy? Have you read this stuff?" and recites Hamlet's "To be or not to be" passage ("To die, to sleep... perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub..."). She explains that "the rub" is a lumpy patch in the lawn game bowls, then rephrases the whole speech crudely as: "Sure, I could end my suffering with death, but THE REAL BUMP IN THE BOWLING ALLEY is maybe after death everything sucks too." In the final panel, shown as silhouettes in the dark, the man muses that archaicism and complexity are doing some important work, while the woman complains that Shakespeare "literally wrote a whole sonnet about his dick and NOBODY NOTICES." The votey/aftercomic is a hand-drawn box containing only the caption: "(Sonnet 136 is the poetical equivalent of a dick pic)."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.