There’s almost no punchline here. Thomas Gray seriously just wrote a poem for a friend called “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat: Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes.” I really could’ve just typed that into a single word balloon and called it a day. The funniest thing here is that I went from a strip about a very serious topic like slavery in the 1700′s to a strip about a rich dilettante’s dead cat. That’s pretty much Lit Brick in a nutshell.
I leave you with this:
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And here I was reading it to the tune of “modern major general”
I love this poem and so does my mother. “All that glitters is not gold”. I’m also pretty sure Gray wasn’t taking it entirely seriously.
I’m not sure he took most of the relaxed portions of that role seriously! :p
The cat was really named Selima? If this poem didn’t pre-date Batman by two centuries, I’d just be assuming that the cat’s full name was Selima Myle.
On listening to the poem, there shouldn’t really be a comma and a question mark there. That’s just Data reading it with strange intonation. It actually makes SENSE thus: “Felis cattus is your taxonomic nomenclature: an endothermic quadruped carnivorous by nature.”
The idea was that the poet was suggesting that as a beginning too his friend.
Thanks for including the clip – I’m not enough of a Trekkie to have gotten the full joke otherwise.
Ahh, I’d forgotten about that poem by Mr. Data! ^^ Thank you for the reference.