I apologize if this is the wrong forum, but it seemed fitting.
Anyways, my question pertains to the old classic Far Side that shows hell’s latest visitor. He’s standing in front of two doors. One says “Damned if you do”, the other states “Damned if you don’t”. What would be wrong if the guy chose the “Damned if you don’t” door? It seems he wouldn’t be damned, thus negating the joke (unless I’m missing something). Though if the guy chose the “Damned if you do” door, he’d effectively be double damned.
If anyone could shed some more light on this, that’d be great.
The joke is that he’s being given the illusion of choice, while not having any choice at all. IT’s a small thing, really, but Larson likes pointing out the small things… similar to the other strip that depicts a newcomer to Hell, takes a sip of coffee, spits it out and exclaims, “Cold coffee? Man, they thought of everything!”
It’s a flawed joke, because it isn’t a false dilemma at all. There’s clearly a correct choice between the two doors. If you take the “damned if you do” door, you’re doubly damned, because you didn’t take the “damned if you don’t” door. If you take the “don’t” door, you’re safe. (Although, presumably, still in Hell.) Larson didn’t really think the thing all the way through, or at the very least, he was hoping no one else would think to much about it. After all, the guy did like two hundred thousand cartoons. Can’t all be gems.
There’s a saying, “Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
IOW, no matter what you do, it’s going to go wrong, and most likely, you’ll be blamed whether you tried to do something or you didn’t.
And so, the joke is that a guy is in Hell, that is, he’s literally damned to Hell (that’s what ‘damned’ means). And so he’s given a choice between two doors. But it doesn’t matter what door he chooses, he’s still damned. Which is the meaning of the saying to begin with.
It’s very easy to overthink a Far Side and put more into it then Larson intended. There’s nothing to say that what it is he has to do or not do is choose a door. He’s just been given a choice and now he has to walk through a door related to that choise and if he chose not to do it, he’s damned, and if he chose to do it, he’s damned. Could be anything. Maybe he was asked if he wanted a room with a view and this being hell, they’d both suck.
Or maybe he did flub it. Although I don’t recall anyother cartoons of his with such a logical failure. And I doubt he’d make a cartoon with such an obvious flaw. But I know he’s made cartoons in which he’s completely missed how other people would see it. Like the dog having sex with the car.
Yeah, the point is that no matter what he does he’s damned. I don’t think you can be “double-damned.” The “don’t” door isn’t any safer than the “do” door.
What’s there to get? No double dooms or right choices as far as I can see. “Don’t” door’s bad, “do” door’s bad. I really honestly can’t think why you’d think otherwise. Could Miller or someone else please explain to how they arrived at the conclusion that the “damned if you don’t” door would be the right option? I’m sincerely interested and completely stumped. There must be a different way of reading it that I can’t see.
They are making a false assumption. They are assuming that one of the choices is morally bad, so if you choose the morally bad option, you are damned for doing so, then you end up damned by operation of the door. This is of course silly; there is nothing about the choice that presupposes one is “better” than the other. Indeed, by operation of the doors, no matter which choice you make, you are damned for it.
As a real world example, take the classic morality lesson where the father is faced with the choice of saving his drowning daughter or his son from the burning house. He can only do one or the other, he can’t expect help from anyone else. Either choice is morally proper, saving one’s offspring from certain death. Both choices end up in a tragic result, the death of an offspring.
