These Numbers Just Don’t Add Up

This cartoon was originally captioned, “Yes, I can see that you added these numbers up, but they still don’t, you know. . .add up.” It’s a fine caption, but if brevity is indeed wit, that line is less than witty.

You see, in general, you only have a few seconds to get a cartoon across to a reader, so any shortcut you can take (implying background, simplifying scenery, pruning a caption) helps a lot.

But this one was a stumper. I couldn’t get past setting it up with “added these numbers up,” that is, until I was tinkering with my budget later that day.

I was using the auto sum function when suddenly the above caption came into sharp focus. An Excel-lent improvement, you could say.