Jokes, fables, and anecdotes share a crucial element: the Setup. A situation is described, and the listener/reader has a little time to imagine where the story is going. Then another crucial element, the Punchline, throws its punch, and the reader/viewer/listener gets moved or otherwise transported.

The three setups I did all depend on words meaning more than one thing. George Carlin was given a setup by an interviewer who asked, “What do you think about the dope problem?” Carlin responded, “Yes, definitely, we have too many dopes!” At that time in the linguistic history of American English, “dope” meant both “drugs” and “stupid person.” In 2019 the joke wouldn’t go over so well because “dope” is now mostly used as an adjective and means something like “good and cool and awesome.”

So Setup #1 is a baseball bat wearing dark glasses. Then the eye goes to the caption “Blind as a Bat.” There are more than one kind of bat, and the one made of wood is even blinder than the one that flies.

“Duck Blind” is both a place where hunters hide and make duck-noises to try to lure ducks to their doom, and…a duck who happens to be blind.

Setup #3 was my most ambitious, and consequently my least successful illustration. There’s a myth that profligate masturbation can cause blindness. So I imagined an equivalent of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who pleased himself one time too many and woke up the next morning to find that he had metamorphosed into…a window blind.

But the punchline to the “Three Setups” here is that the three setups had much less to do with story- or joke-telling than they had to do with Drawing Practice. I had felt so guilty that I’d spent so little time on my “Motor Cycle” card (see previous post) that I decided to do at least a solid hour’s additional drawing. Mission accomplished, and then some!