He’s filling up with water so he can go on a peeing spree with his buddies.
Is that something dogs do? Roam the streets with their buddies peeing on stuff? I wouldn’t know.
I take it you’ve never had a pet dog…
The tune for “John Brown’s Body” was later used in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Peeing and sniffing other dog’s pee is instinctive behavior for dogs. A dog walk can be called “checking the pee-mail.”
Never mind.
Not all mixups result in nonsense. This caption switch improved both comics:
That was mentioned in the Wiki post. Julia Ward Howe found the original lyrics to be morbid and resolved to pen better ones herself.
Ooops
It just feels to me like there should be more to the joke. Something about the body shop should reference the lyrics of the song. Otherwise the joke would just be the title, and not the accompanying image.
They also use pee to mark their territories and property. Hence the old gag of dogs peeing on trees, fire hydrants, and people they happen to like.
One of the funniest cartoons I’ve ever seen was about a guy taking his dog into the woods to show him how to pee on trees instead of furniture.
The dog “gets” it and starts peeing on furniture standing on two legs instead of three.
My interpretation was somewhat similar, at least when I was a kid dogs loved drinking water from hoses (you can look up videos of this all over YouTube) and so the dog is “pre-gaming” by drinking out of the hose, like when dudes drink alcohol before hanging out with their buddies. So a dog looking forward to a rowdy all nighter would be drinking out of a hose.
I took it as an existential representation of the Mason-Dixon line, but this made me think.
Sorry, I misremembered the caption:
Larson said he didn’t expect the response this one got. I guess he didn’t realize the composition was a bit off.
As an aside, I remember an issue of Little Lulu at Summer Camp where the kids sang this version around a campfire:
John Brown’s baby had a cold upon his chest, (3x)
so he rubbed it with camphorated oil.
I wonder how many other variants there have been.
It happened twice.
Theory: All Dennis the Menace cartoons could be improved by replacing their caption with one from The Far Side.
Corollary: there’s no helping Family Circus
Now you do! Ignorance…um…y’know…
Dan
Yes, obviously. That’s the first thing I thought of when I viewed the panel, even before I read the sign.