I’m fighting my image-editing software so I wasn’t able to complete adding copyright notices to these. So please don’t share on social media or risk distribution. I’ve got a lot cartoons I created but processing them is very tedious.
“Mediocrates” (but it’s been done).
“Pla-doh!”, the very malleable philosopher.
“Plato’s Bat-Cave” might have something.
Your fun suggestions are thinking in the same ballpark as those in my current ideas and drafts list:
I’m playing with the idea of Kolapsicrates, the Greek philosopher of the Cynic school [there was a real such person named Crates] who was especially annoyed by wasteful, difficult-to-recycle, oversized Amazon boxes. (Yes, they were delivered seven-days-a-week by female warriors in chariots in those days.) But a lot of these kinds of jokes are not easy to visually render and some are meant to be a kind of puzzle for people (sort of like “where’s Waldo”) to find the joke, as in Kolapsicrates allegedly meaning “Collapse-the-crates”.
For that I have been working on:
“Pilates, the philosopher with the very flexible ontology.”
For that one I have been struggling between either “Plato’s Analogy of the Bat-Cave” or “Plato’s Analogy of the Man-Cave.” (Someone who spent there entire life in a man-cave would have little understanding of the outside world.)
But that general concept took me very easily to Hypatia and I’m already fairly sure what I’m going to do to illustrate
“Hypatia’s She-Shed” which will show that famous Alexandrian philosopher sitting on a chain swing on the front porch of a tiny backyard “shed” (behind the Library of Alexandria) which will have Doric stone columns holding up the porch roof. She will be drinking chamomile tea and holding a Ptolemaic geocentric armillary/celestial sphere in her lap.
Now how do I clearly depict all of that in one cartoon?
Suggestions appreciated.
Meanwhile, I suddenly got on this cartoon binge on Saturday morning and I decided to experiment to see if Gemini Advanced had been improving its image-generation skills. Indeed, it has made great leaps forward since the last time I tried. I’m fast at generating joke-ideas for cartoons but very very slow at actually drawing them----so I was pleasantly surprised it only took about an hour to generate a dozen passable cartoons in first-draft form.
I started with the name “The Entropic Misanthrope” but that sounded too non-humorous and Cynical [pun intended]. So I went with the persona of “The Entropic Professor” (as in quickly heading towards a state of total decay and disorder) and hope to produce various series to follow up on “Greek Philosophers for the History-Impaired.” Those include:
“Tragically Misunderstood Maxims Among the Hearing Impaired.” [inspired by my own hearing losses.]
“Not-So-Great Moments in Western Civilization”
[Yes, I will recycle my greatly overused and obvious SBL lecture warm-up joke about undergrad students imagining Martin Luther gagging at the Diet of Worms in 1521.]
“Overlooked Embarrassing Incidents in the Lives of Ancient Romans”
I’ve already created a cartoon of the Emperor Claudius on his laptop accidentally discovering Messalina’s OnlyFans chatroom.
“Unpublished but Potentially Practical Scientific Discoveries”
(That includes Robert Boyle claiming in private letters to several members of the Royal Society that a lunch of jalapeno refried-beans and broccoli enchiladas led to his unpublished Non-Ideal Gas Law.)
I may be saving Kolapsicrates and Pilates for “Almost Forgotten Philosophers of the Ancient World.” (And I probably won’t make use of the very obvious “Klitoris of Lesbos: Real or Rumor Shrouded in Myth?”)
By the way, I’ve also played with the idea of the famous Hippocrates being very annoyed at the people who constantly misspelled his name as Hypocrites. Would the joke “work”? [And interestingly enough, both are actual ancient Greek names. Hippo-crates means “horse + power” as in horse-tamer while Hypocrites means “actor/stage-player.”]
I like to create humor that takes more than casual thought—so that even a sight-gag like “Zeno’s Parasox” has a funny visual for kids but becomes much more fun when they know of Zeno’s famous paradox. (And do they know about it, if they haven’t yet studied calculus and series/limits???)
At this stage I don’t want these cartoons to go massively public, but I would cautiously like to know reactions/comments about how readily people get the joke. (Obviously, most high school dropouts are unlikely to get some of these.)
That said, I’d love to hear if the family members et al of Peaceful Science readers “got the jokes.” I’ve thought about trying to do a syndicated cartoon strip in my old age—as probably many people have tried to do, while also writing the Great American Novel— but don’t know if it is worth the effort.
I got all of the jokes except for the last one about Aristotle. The second one took me a little while though (it’s a reference to Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes, right?)
Aristotle’s quotable quotes include “Man is a social animal.” He meant that humans are naturally inclined to form relationships, live in communities, and form societies. So as a young, eligible post-doc, Aristotle was “chatting up” beautiful young women at cocktail parties—and in this case I wanted to make it look like the “playboy stereotype” of the 1950’s and 1960’s. (Yep, I’m old so my humor is kind of retro in this context.) I worded Aristotle’s statement to sound like it was part of a cliched dialogue of young men approaching young women at parties. The punchline is meant to draw to mind a dialogue like this:
Aristotle: “How about you and I go to my place to look at my sketchings.”
Young woman: “No way. You are just being fresh, trying to get me to go somewhere with you so we can be alone.”
Aristotle: “Of course, that is exactly what I’m doing. After all, man is a social animal.”
Of course, part of the humor is placing an ancient Greek philosopher in a toga and placing him in the 1950’s cocktail party like he was playboy Hugh Hefner.
Yes. It struck me that Aristotle’s famous statement about “knowing nothing” was remarkably similarly worded to Sgt. Schultz’s catchphrase, although with an entirely different meaning and purpose. I hope people find that juxtaposition whimsical, especially through the visual mix of the German helmet and the ancient Greek toga.
[And yes, Sgt. Schultz’s helmet in the TV show was also humorous for the fact that he and other military personnel at the stalag were all German Luftwaffe (air force) but Schultz was wearing the Stahlhelm helmet of the German army! So my Socrates did also.]
Thanks for providing feedback on the cartoons. Humor is very subjective and it is not obvious how audiences will “process” a given joke, sight-gag, maxim, or factoid.
I thought it was funny! Not sure the Hogan’s Heroes reference would work with a younger audience though, the only reason I knew about it is because my dad used to watch reruns on TV sometimes.
True enough. What I find interesting is that many popular TV shows of that era (1960’s and early 1970’s)—and Hogan’s Heroes had huge ratings at the time—were “rediscovered” by later generations in syndication. And that apparently happened with H.H. for a while, even in Germany. (Germans have even told me that it continues to have a small but enthusiastic “cult following” there today.) But unlike most of those old series, modern sensitivities about making comedy out of a terrible war took a toll on the syndication popularity after 2000 or so. In part that was due to some people confusing a POW camp for airmen with a German concentration camp for Jews and other “undesirables.”
Hogan's Heroes, and the Real Hammelburg.
That article may not mention it but I’ve heard Germans say that in the version of the TV series broadcast there, they are forbidden by law (except under certain carefully defined circumstances) to include the “Heil Hitler!”, so the dubbing in German says, “The corn is this high!” If that is true, it is quite funny and fits the slapstick nature of the mockery of all things Nazi which was the aim of the series.
Meanwhile, I would fail at doing comedy for young people. I’ve watched some comedy aimed at today’s teens and twenty-somethings and even though I do grasp a moderate percentage of their idioms and cultural references, much of it I do not find all that clever. (Of course, I also did not find Hogan’s Heroes all that funny. It was very repetitive and more slapstick than witty. Not all that entertaining to me.)
One of the redeeming features of Hogan’s heroes was that the Germans were played by Holocaust survivors.
I’ve heard Robert Cleary describe at length his own experience in a railroad “cattle car” that took him to a concentration camp. I listened to a 90 minute late-night radio interview of Cleary when I was making a very long drive years ago. Probably most of what I know of the series and its background and people comes from that interview.
I’ve heard that the “Colonel Klink” and “Sgt Schultz” actors (both Jews) managed to leave Nazi German in the 1930’s before things got too dangerous for them.
I’ve also heard it said that Werner Klemperer who played the Commandant specified in his contract that his character could NEVER be allowed to “win” even a minor victory by the conclusion of any episode—and that he would ALWAYS be portrayed as a bumbling fool in every episode, because Klemperer wanted there to be no ambiguity about how much he despised the Nazis.
By the way, I found it interesting that Klemperer’s very real violin skills were sometimes used on the show. When I got interested in classical music, I discovered that his father was a very successful and world-famous orchestra conductor—so that probably explains his violin talents.
Can you work it so he is saying one thing but doing the opposite? (ie: being hypocritical) Perhaps misspelling someone’s name while making his complaint? 
Great idea! I actually have some drafts which did that sort of thing—but all of them seemed too forced and/or they seemed to “distract” from the Hippo/Hypo part of the joke. The best ideas I had for what you are suggesting required multiple frames—and for that I would really need “speech balloons” above characters. I am HOPING that G.I. will eventually provide for such.
I haven’t tried lately but in the past various A.I. engines have been unable to do something as simple as "Create an image of a house with a sign in front on the lawn which says, ‘Stay off the grass—cuz that stuff will really mess you up!’ " Instead, the sign would simply be filled with gibberish.
Similarly, if you request an image of a car driving down a highway with billboards along the road, the billboards have messages like “BCJKOPZY XYYY WJIDY.”
Correction: Gemini Advanced, at least, can now handle quite well instructions for making signs/banners/billboards inside of images. Just tried it.
I can do some moderately complex photo/image editing, including layers, which are what you need for adding speech balloons.
I use a free program (Paint.net) which does pretty much everything Abode Photoshop can do. It can even do animated GIF images, but you still have to create all the frames.
I had hoped to avoid a post-production program like that—but it is probably going to be necessary simply because A.I. often produces a great image but spoils it with some stupid artifact. (I’m surprised that a small orange dot/blob is appearing on some images.)
I thought I read long ago that someone had published freeware that focused ONLY a the speech balloons and made it super simple. Haven’t look for it.
I had so many irritations with the freeware “photoshop” tool that reviewers say is “the very best” (so unintuitive for the simplest things!) that I just started brainstorming by using Discourse “markup language” and then taking a screen shot. Quick and dirty—as I am above all quite lazy. (For me, the fun is in crafting the joke itself.)
I’ve used layers in graphics software in the past—but keep thinking “I’m too old for this crap.”)
As to Paint.net, the link to the free software (rather than the professional trial) now goes to a Google search. So I wonder if that free version is dead.