The Endless Comedy of Stick Figures in Peril
What’s funnier than a stick figure experiencing misfortune? Hundreds or even thousands of them. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
Hello! Tuesday’s post about tsunami warning signs, many of which feature large waves crashing down on ill-fated stick figures, prompted a comment from reader Elizabeth Fox, who pointed me toward an excellent Flickr group that is right up my alley but that I was somehow unaware of: Stick Figures in Peril, which was founded in 2004 and now features over 26,000 photos. “There goes the rest of your day,” she said, accurately.
To scroll through Stick Figures in Peril is to enter a world where almost every conceivable aspect of everyday life is, well, perilous. Work? Perilous. Play? Perilous. Getting from Point A to Point B? Very, very perilous. And who is being confronted with all these hazards? A seemingly endless procession of hapless stick figures in various states of tripping, slipping, falling, drowning, dismemberment, electrocution, and more. Although depicted without faces, their emotional distress is almost always apparent, as if you can see their mouths agape, their eyebrows arched in alarm.
Despite all these tribulations, the overarching mood of Stick Figures in Peril is one of comedy, not tragedy. The key factor here, as with so many good collections, is repetition. Just as we enjoy watching certain cartoon characters who continually experience injury and even death yet keep coming back for more (Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bill, Kenny from South Park, Scratchy from The Simpsons), it’s hard not to laugh at the litany of misfortunes visited upon the stick figures. Here’s one with a tree falling on him; here’s one descending into quicksand; here’s one getting his arm caught in an auger; and on and on. The world rains down these calamities without malice, without judgment — it’s all very matter-of-fact, almost deadpan. The net effect is that the stick figure becomes the ultimate straight man, the only one who isn’t in on the joke.
Stick Figures in Peril features far too many images for me to have fully investigated all of them (yet). But here are some of the most interesting ones I’ve found, broken down into major peril categories (with occasional observations added in some of the captions):
The Perils of Walking
