WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS COMIC?
Okay, so there’s a frog and a fly. It says “Frog Ophthalmology”, but it looks like the fly is the patient, so maybe it should be “Fly Ophthalmology”? Whatever, nevermind that.
So we’ve got a frog doctor, I think, and what is he doing with his tongue? Is his tongue vibrating up and down? These motion lines seem to indicate that his tongue is vibrating vertically:
But frogs’ tongues don’t move like that, right? Let’s assume that the artist meant the tongue to be flicking in and out, like frogs’ tongues do. Okay.
So we’ve got a frog doctor that’s tonguing a fly’s eyes. Don’t frogs eat flies? Why isn’t the frog eating the fly? Why is he treating him as a patient? I’ve never read this comic before, so maybe the frog and fly are recurring characters, and it’s wacky that they treat each other as equals? Naah, doesn’t look like it.
It looks like the fly is getting an eye exam, because he’s saying “worse, worse,” and that’s what you might say when your eye doctor is trying to determine your prescription, right? When they do that, though, isn’t the patient usually looking through the phoropter? Why does the comic explicity show a phoropter in the upper part of the frame, but then doesn’t have the fly looking through it?
Alright, I’m still confused why a fly would go to a frog doctor? Wouldn’t he be worried about the frog eating him? Maybe the fly is completely blind, so he doesn’t KNOW he’s at a frog doctor, but then how can he know his vision is “worse” if he’s that blind?
Wait, what’s he looking at, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be looking at an eye chart? But instead he’s looking directly at a frog that’s flicking its tongue at him?
Oh, is this supposed to be, like, laser surgery? The frog’s tongue is a laser, I guess. But you don’t tell the doctor DURING laser surgery that he’s lasered you enough. Does the frog do this with all his patients, even if they’re not flies? I mean, I assume this frog doctor treats OTHER frogs, usually. So maybe a frog comes in and he’s like “laser my eyes while I tell you how it’s goin, doc”, and the frog doctor start licking the crap out of the frog patient’s eyes and he’s like “yeah, that’s good.”
But, there HAS to be some significance to the patient being a fly. So maybe the frog doctor NORMALLY does laser surgery with a laser, but since a fly suddenly came in, the frog doctor was like, “I’ll toy with this fly by tasting his eyeballs for a little while, and he’ll think I’m lasering him.” If so, then this scene really isn’t TYPICAL “Frog Ophthalmology” at all. It’s more “Frog Malpractice,” I guess.
So a frog tricks a maybe-blind fly to come in for an eye exam, and then instead of eating the fly, the frog tongues the fly’s eyes for a while, which the fly thinks will help his vision but instead it makes it slightly worse. And that’s called “Frog Ophtalmology”. And this comic is in newspapers. Can I start laughing at the joke now?
Thank you to Malki, who posts stuff like this on his twitter frequently.
-Drew
Kriss Straub’s altered version makes far more sense.
UPDATE: Someone just linked me to this site. Another theory posited there: The frog is holding sticks in his mouth for some reason?
I had many of those questions myself. Not that many, but then I didn’t think about it for too long before giving up. (BTW, no; they aren’t recurring characters. This strip is a one-off every day.)
I think the frogs tongue is supposed to resemble switching the glasses on that big thing the doctor put in front of you… Saying “Which is better, one *switch* or two?”
Oh… but that thing is above the fly…. Maybe the frog is impersonating a doctor? To taste the fly? Idk
Maybe the joke isn’t as deep as you’re thinking. Maybe this is a frog ophthalmology, which usually services other frogs. But a fly comes in and wants an eye exam. Given he’s a frog, he can’t help sticking his tongue out. As Justice mentioned above, the fly keeps thinking he’s switching between 2 lens, and his vision isn’t getting any better.
Exactly!
The frog is an eye doctor.
The fly needs to go to the eye doctor, so walks in in the hope of being treated.
The frog, upon seeing a fly, loses all professionalism and can’t help but obey his instincts by trying to eat the fly.
The fly thinks the doctor is trying to treat him and is saying ‘this isn’t working!’.
Perfectly simple.
This was hilarious, but I just had a thought!
Is the frog adjust the “lens” of the fly’s eye??? Isn’t of switching the lenses on the doohickey, it’s switching the fly’s complex eye to bring it into focus?
Does that make *any* sense??
Wow, my comment had so many typos. I guess I got a little too excited about my brilliant idea.
Read this comment instead:
This was hilarious, but I just had a thought!
Is the frog adjusting the “lens” of the fly’s eye??? Instead of switching the lenses on the doohickey, it’s switching the fly’s complex eye to bring it into focus?
Does that make *any* sense??
I bet it’s one of those things where the guy is trying to get over his fear by facing it. I knew that aimlessly surfing Wikipedia for hours on end would help me someday!
Lemme find it…
Here we go!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
This is almost as bad as The Far Side’s “Cow Tools”: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2347642183_714b1ca7b3.jpg
I do not get this at all.
My guess was that “opthamology” is frog-talk for “dominatrix”, and she’s not very good at it.
Clearly the moral of this comic is that frogs are terrible doctors.
maybe it has something to do with the fact that many reptiles and amphibians tend to lick their own eyes? Thus for a frog, it would be their form of “eye treatment”, or ophthalmology. So this is a universe in which frogs have evolved to not do things for themselves anymore and instead pay another frog to do lick their eyes for them.. which is gross..
So this fly went to the frog ophthalmologist because he’s an idiot, but frog tongue doesn’t help his crazy compound eyes…
Either way, booooo.
That actually makes more sense than any of the other suggestions postulated. I doubt it’s what the artist had in mind, though. The artist was probably just having some kind of brain fart on a day when he was out of good ideas.
I’ve actually read a Gary Larson book where he tried to explain what he was thinking when he did the “Cow Tools” comic, and it was something along the same lines. He needed an idea for a comic, and he’d been reading something about chimpanzees using tools, and he thought “wouldn’t it be funny if cows turned out to be tool users too?” (Of course it was funny to Larson, because the very concept of cows in any context seemed to be something he found hopelessly hilarious. I guess we all have topics like that.)
Flies don’t see very well objects that are directly in front of them (you can almost touch a fly if you move your finger in from the front). So, maybe there are eye charts located on either side of the fly.
I can only assume that the fly trusted Dr. Frog because he is a doctor. The frog, still actually being a frog, decided that having a fly as a patient was too good of an opportunity to pass up. However, that fly is comparatively larger than most flies the frog has come across, so he’s “tasting” the fly to see if it would be worth it to try and take the fly down in an effort to eat him. The fly, having never been to a frog opthalmologist before, believes this eye licking is common practice.
It makes no sense. I’m suffering a serious mindf**k trying to work it out, and I now feel anger at having seen this frog comic. Woe is me
Careful, I’m using a lot of highly technical terms in my explanations.
Ok, so I figure that the phoroptor isn’t being used because the flys eyes (hahaha that can also mean balls) are far too complex - they sort of look like disco balls with all their individual mini-panes. So in order to test and figure out which of the little mini-panes are defective, the frog opthamologist is covering them up one by one by flicking them with his tongue. When he flicks a mini-eye thing thats in perfect functioning order the fly would say “worse” because suddenly one of his normal vision holes is being covered up. The end.
Alternatively, deep inside, I think the frog probably wants to eat the fly, and he keeps trying by thwacking out his sticky tongue in rapid succession - since the fly is supersized it isn’t working out and the fly is becoming frustrated.
PS. The fly reminds me of Jeff Goldblum. I find imagining the fly with a Jeff Goldblum voice really brings the whole comic together for me.
Hold on, perhaps it is just a very subtle joke about oral sex (the frog is licking the fly’s eyes, which as you pointed out can be a euphemism for balls)
And to think that Strange Brew is usually one of the better comics in the paper near where I live that publishes it. But can someone tell me what is going on in this comic?
Carrots are dangerous as hell! (when placed in the proper hands, that is)
Wasn’t there some movie where Clive Owen’s character stabbed someone with a carrot?
that would be Shoot ‘Em Up (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/)
Tigapunch is an anagram for “pitch a gun.” Or “chug paint.” Or “cat pig hun.” Or “cap gun hit.” Or “naught pic.”
I also thought of some that weren’t fit to post in public. At least not under my own name.
hmmm…well the first impression I got was the frog is whacking individual eyes (flies have lots and lots of them) to try to calibrate them or get them to focus. This makes no sense because eye doctors don’t do this but they’re animals and it makes sense in cartoon-land i guess.
That was just my first impression. The more I look at it the less it makes sense. Even in cartoon-land or for a cheap gag like this, it’s baffling because the frog’s use of its tongue is COMPLETELY unnescessary. The opthamologist being a frog serves no purpose in the joke, because we almost always associate frogs and flies as respective predator and prey. There is no reason a fly would need to go to a frog for eye work REGARDLESS of what the frog is actually doing, which is baffling in itself.
SUMMARY: Even if this joke made a shred of sense, it still wouldn’t be funny.
that is all.
Isn’t it obvious? The frog is the patient and instead of reading letters in focus, he hs to hit the fly, but because he has the wrong lenses in/on he can’t get his depth perception right and keeps missing.
Alternatively, the frog is the doctor and is shielding the different layers of the fly’s eye to determine which angles of the eye’s lense are inept. Or you could even assume that the frog has various lenses in his mouth and is aplying them one by one at great speed, which would work as flies basically live at a faster rate than most other things. Imagine turning into a fly, it might be like time slowing down around you.
I guess it’s not obvious, lmao.
“Mouches volantes”, non?
if you look, the phoropter looks quite like the flies face, i beleive the joke is that the FROG is so blind it cant tell the difference between the flies face and th phoropter, as for the flies responses, it probably seeing the tongue as blurry (because its moving so fast), and thinks its something wrong with its vision
also, the tongue is the frog attempting to change the phoropter