The story behind the cartoon
Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" was published in 1867, in his collection New Poems. Its speaker stands on the shore at night listening to the grating roar of pebbles drawn back by the waves, and hears in that sound an eternal note of sadness. The poem's famous image follows: the Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled — but now it is retreating, leaving the shore exposed.
This cartoon puts Merv in the poem's aftermath. The anxious pale-metal robot stands at a weathered beach hut, pencil behind his ear, notebook in hand, studying a tide table pinned to the wall with great seriousness. He is planning his day around the sea's return, consulting the chart as if the timetable could summon the water back.
Behind him, the joke is already complete. The tide has gone out past the horizon, leaving only wet sand, shallow pools, and a stranded rowboat tethered to a post, going nowhere. Nothing in the frame suggests the sea is coming back on schedule; the whole beach is the evidence that it has left.
The joke is the planning itself: Merv is doing impeccable administration for an event that has already been cancelled. The tide table is accurate, the pencil is sharp, the notebook is open — and the only vessel in sight is beached. He has scheduled his day around a sea that left without telling him.
ONE MORE BOND
LOOP-ECTOMY
CUT THE CORD
THE SIXTH WINDOW