Castaway Catastrophes
“There were three men stranded on a desert island. One day they find a genie that grants each one of them a wish. The first man said, “I wish to go back home,” and the genie granted his wish and sent him home. The second man says the same and also gets sent home, and the third man said, “I’m lonely, I wish my friends were back here.”
(Photo by DEA / C.DANI / I.JESKE/De Agostini/Getty Images)
This is a typical example of what is known as a “desert island joke,” which are always based around a person or group of people stranded on a desert island. This type of joke first started appearing in cartoon strips in The New Yorker in the 1930s, according to Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker . This is apparently due to the huge popularity of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe , which is about a castaway that spends 28 years on a remote tropical island before being rescued. The earlier newspaper cartoons feature a large island with a ship sinking in the distance, and later cartoons show one or two people on a tiny island with a single palm tree. Sometimes, this setting is used to portray certain stereotypes based on nationality, profession, race, or religion or the people involved can be famous people and take on a more topical form.