what? I don't get it

I have a New Yorker daily cartoon desk calendar. It was a gift last xmas, and sometimes it's nice to start the day with a cute or funny cartoon. Unfortunately the New Yorker is a poor resource for this. I often wonder why people would read that particular rag, and after having the cartoons, I wonder even further. Some don't even make sense:


There were definitely some good ones in there, but by and large they were weak or poor. I would have expected the calendar to be a showcase, a sort of best of, but I certainly hope it isn't, now that I've seen the dismal quality of the humor. It's almost as bad as the typical syndicated newspaper cartoon, except these guys have more time to write and, presumably, should have done a better job.

One of the few saving graces was a blog article, retelling another blog article, on boing boing earlier this that saved a good quarter of the cartoons (more than half were beyond saving). Simply replace the caption with "Christ, what an asshole!", and magically the humor is repaired.