"This has to end," Yost admitted to reporters as the Brewers readied themselves for a four-game series against St. Louis. "We can't have players trying to eat one another, even in Milwaukee, so we're taking steps. We've already talked to both players, explaining that while they are big, they are not food. And as a provisional measure, we've gotten Ray Durham from the Giants in the hopes that both Prince and C.C. will think he's a giant ham and leave one another alone."

Awesome!

There's historians of every other stripe on this site, so there must be some comedy historians here, so...

Does the imagining someone else as a food due to starvation begin with Chaplin (Gold Rush I think) or does the gag go back further than that?

Does the imagining someone else as a food due to starvation begin with Chaplin (Gold Rush I think) or does the gag go back further than that?

Nah...The Simpsons did that one first.

And I for one appreciate the Jeffrey Dahmer reference.

I'm imagining Jebediah Groening with puppets.

This is obviously a direct reference to the 'Tradewind Islands' Looney Tunes cartoon from 1943. Interestingly Gold Rush was re-released in 1942, so it was likely an influence on Chuck Jones, who very likely saw the movie previously of course.

Does the imagining someone else as a food due to starvation begin with Chaplin (Gold Rush I think) or does the gag go back further than that?

Sir Dinada thought that Sir La Cote De Male Tayle was a giant roasted gamehen when they were both starving in the snow during the beginning of the 5th book.

i hope that's a vegandog.

Sir Dinada thought that Sir La Cote De Male Tayle was a giant roasted gamehen when they were both starving in the snow during the beginning of the 5th book.

5th book of what?

i remember from my tintin books that haddock thought tintin was a bottle of wine when they were stranded in the desert during 'the crab with the golden claws' and tried to uncork him by pulling off his head. that dates from the late 30s i think.

Cool. A Tintin nod in this place.

Thank you.

God imagined Lot's wife as a pillar of salt. Cartoonists and Charlie Chaplin have been stealing His stuff for a long time.

i grew up with tintin. he's my avatar. you could prob. show me a panel or a bit of dialog and i could tell you what book it's from.

Both Laaurel and Hardy and Abbott/Costello had bits like this.

i grew up with tintin. he's my avatar. you could prob. show me a panel or a bit of dialog and i could tell you what book it's from.

I remember liking Tintin a lot when I was young, but it lost its flavour once I discovered Asterix.

or does the gag go back further than that?

There is the story of Tantalus, but that gag went awry.

You guys are too cultured. I was thinking of this (go to 6:40, specifically).

I remember liking Tintin a lot when I was young, but it lost its flavour once I discovered Asterix.

funny thing, i never liked asterix. but i would read the tintin books until they fell apart. at one time or another i had the entire set in the old hardback covers with the taped binding. as they wore out, i would buy the soft cover versions ... i still have one or two of my originals. most of the pages are stained from repeatedly reading at the table turning the pages with food on my fingers ... drove my mom nuts.

Love the headline.

I love Tintin. I build plastic aircraft models, and some time ago I bought the Blue Rider decal sheet to build the Mosquito from The Red Sea Sharks. Herge loved aircraft, and the airplanes in the series were always depicted accurately, although often in fictional markings.

Tintin Mosquito decal

My fantasy team keeps picturing Sabathia as a giant flotation device.

I am also a huge Tintin fan - I've got all of them, albeit in soft cover, and have had them since I was 10 or so.

I remember liking Tintin a lot when I was young, but it lost its flavour once I discovered Asterix.

Exactly the same here. Tintin probably had better storylines, but I think the humor in Asterix comix was much more modern and that appealed to me more as I got older.

EDIT: Also as I got older I became a little more aware of the 1930s-era racism in Tintin comics. I realize it's just a product of the time, but it's still pretty bad.

They [the earliest ones] were written for a right-wing newspaper, and he was required to put that in there. For an example of anti-racism, try The Blue Lotus.

I think the humor in Asterix comix was much more modern and that appealed to me more as I got older.

Yup, I found Asterix to be rather punny, and Tintin to be a bit too slapstick. But still..We had a circle as poor highschoolers/undergrads. One bought the Asterix set ( me ), one the Tintin, another Calvin and Hobbes, and one the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Much rejoicing ensued.

shayborg, you must have stopped reading tintin about 60 years ago. herge was politically naive and produced some questionable early work, as he himself admitted later, but he scrupulously recrafted tintin's ethos through the 50s until he was almost what we'd now call politically correct. its easy to criticize herge in hindsight but we should remember he died in 1983 or thereabouts. he's missed the last 20 yrs of savaging of western culture by the latest generation or cultural critics (some of it warranted, i'll admit). even so, i think his work stands up to scrutiny pretty well. as observed in a previous post, the blue lotus was about the subjugation of china by foreign powers pre-wwII, and westerners come off pretty bad. in king ottokar's sceptre, tintin breaks up a fascist overthrow of the fictional country of syldavia. in the castafiore emerald, tintin and haddock generously offer a campground to gypsies, who were otherwise forced to set up in the town dump. the list doesn't stop there.

They managed to use a pic of Fielder looking pretty fit (relatively) for that photoshop job.

I was watching the end of the Brewers game the other night, and when CC untucked his jersey I thought man that's a lot of fabric. And Prince is even bigger.

So other than the joke posts, so far Chaplin is still the earliest cite for the gag?

The sort of thing that interests me, that's all.

So other than the joke posts, so far Chaplin is still the earliest cite for the gag?

Being as how "I thought you was a chicken" is 83 years old, I'd think so. The closest visual I've seen to it was Newman picturing Kramer, after Kramer had smeared butter all over himself and then fallen asleep out on the sun roof.

I also love Tintin. I have almost all of the books, and possibly funded the Tintin store in San Francisco in its early years (figurines, t-shirts, Tintin book ends, etc). This thread gives me hope that the Spielberg Tintin movie will be a hit in America.

Herge's first comics are quite stereotypical and aren't even included in the Tintin canon, with the exception of Tintin in America (which still has some rather pointed social commentary about the exploitation of Indians). When Herge wrote the Blue Lotus, a priest at a university wrote to him concerned about the stereotypes that may arise and introduced Herge to Chang Chon-Chen, who became a close friend of Herge and introduced him to Chinese culture. This friendship is recorded as Tintin's friendship with Chang in the Blue Lotus and other stories.