(For those who don’t want to go to the link: A couple is depicted standing at a railing looking over a body of water. It looks like they’re either it some resort or perhaps aboard a cruise ship. One says to the other: “Next vacation, let’s leave the chicken at home.” The aforementioned chicken stands alongside them…headless.
Why is the chicken headless? Is the point of the cartoon that something bad happened to chicken this trip, so they don’t want to bring it next time? Is there something in the picture that I’m missing that would account for Clucker’s recent decapitation? What say ye?
The “joke” is the silliness of bringing a chicken on a cruise in the first place. It also indirectly lampoons the (recently fashionable?) practice of keeping chickens as pets.
Remember, this is a New Yorker cartoon. It is intended to strike the reader as mildly amusing, perhaps even inspire a silent chuckle; but laughter would be in bad taste. (It also serves the secondary function of separating the cognoscenti who “get it” from the common horde who look at it and say, “WTF is so funny?!”)
I think the New Yorker does an annual feature where it reprints its least understood cartoons from the previous year and explain what the joke is supposed to be. (Or, at any rate, they did that in one edition that I happened to be reading. The least understood cartoon of that year, IIRC, showed one palm tree with a word bubble saying “You made me love you,” to which another group of palm trees respond “I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it.” The explanation was that it was just an absurdist take on the old 30s song.) Anyways, keep an eye out for that cartoon to be explained if they do that feature again.
My thought was along the same lines as what people have been posting above – spin on the “let’s leave the kids home next year” thing.
No, no, maybe they’re right. Perhaps the artist was going for a Winslow Homeresque effect by having us see the chicken’s face in a three-quarters hind view, as it gazes longingly out to sea.
That’s probably why they regret bringing the chicken along with them, because they’d been hoping to spend their time playing Hearts with the chicken. But all it wants to do is mope around and gaze longingly out to sea, and two handed Hearts is a dull game. If only they’d brought a Cribbage board.
I think the chicked is supposed to have a head, and is merely badly drawn. I looked at the cartoon before reading the thread, and it never occurred to me that the chicken was headless.
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