Having done two recent posts on my own adventures in creative Venn diagramming—“The Venn of ‘Q’” and “The Venn of Jesus”—I am naturally now following up with a post on other people’s entertaining efforts in this area.
The Venn diagram above—the “Venn diagram of Venn diagrams”—is a thing of beauty. And not just because of the graphical care that went into its rendering! It’s meta humor of an elegant order, and about as rigorously thought out as a “Venn diagram of Venn diagrams” would need to be. Pie charts do entail circles and information, but without overlapping! Eclipses do entail overlapping circles without information.1 And overlapping information does constitute redundancy, I guess. Hm. Could that one be improved?
This diagram also is accurate meta humor, though obviously less elegant than the first diagram. To begin with, it is not, strictly speaking, a Venn diagram of Venn diagram understanding, because it’s not strictly a Venn diagram at all, only a Euler diagram.2 For social media meme purposes, though, all Euler diagrams are called “Venn diagrams,” so we’ll say no more about that!
This bit of graphical cleverness is a Venn diagram, albeit more dependent on the graphical rendering for its effect than the original Venn of Venns. It’s not as rigorous, though, because the binary overlaps, for obvious reasons, aren’t labeled.3 The Venn-ness of the joke lies solely in the central overlap of all three sets (as rendered).
This is solid Venn humor (though not of the meta, Venn-Venn kind we’ve been looking at until now). I’ve seen several versions of this “Hey buddy” Venn, but I thought none of them was quite as successful as this gag could be, so I made my own, with slight improvements.4
This one has a clever Old Testament link. I’m particularly impressed by that Job–Backstreet Boys overlap; that’s a deep cut.5
One rule of Venn humor: If one of the three categories is incongruous, unexpected, or otherwise funny, it goes in the last place, i.e., the bottom/right. In this case, the Backstreet Boys are positioned as a punchline.6
Here’s another one with two Old Testament tie-ins . . .
The overlaps here are all good, but the best is the one about getting suspended, so it’s positioned in the lower right.
This outstanding feat of nerdery and graphical flair will make complete sense only to viewers who familiar with, in addition to the three named franchises, Joss Whedon’s brief-lived, 2002 sci-fi Western series Firefly, which occupies the central overlap here (in the metonymic form of Serenity, the Firefly-class spaceship that is home to the main cast).
Cherry on the top: Two of the three circles (“Time for some thrilling heroics” and “I can kill you with my brain”) are labeled with quotations from Firefly. On the other hand, there is one weak point: How does “Time for some thrilling heroics” not apply to Star Wars?
Attempting a four-circle “Venn”7 is quite a feat (see my “Venn of ‘Q’” for an extremely cool example), and I appreciate the effort that went into this dystopian summa:
The catch is, I’m not sure the two-way and three-way overlaps … make any sense at all? For example, how does the overlap of Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale look anything like Soylent Green? How does adding Brave New World into the mix produce The Matrix?
The more you look at this one, the more it looks like the titles were thrown in almost randomly and the whole joke is the center. What if we were to redo this? What overlaps might make sense? Could it be argued, for example, that
the overlap of Nineteen Eighty-four and Fahrenheit 451 is V For Vendetta?8
the overlap of Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale is Gattica?9
What do you think?
Now, here’s a four-circle Venn that works much better:
The layout should be flopped horizontally,10 but other than that I have no real criticisms of this one.
Then there’s this awe-inspiring seven-region tour de force:
Sure, some of these overlaps (or rather non-overlaps) are questionable or even plain wrong.11 But you know what? I don’t care. The sheer effort, thought, and love that went into this makes it a rare achievement.
Finally, a hat trick of Venn diagrams with something in common.
This very clever graphic stretches the Venn concept so far that I’m not sure it qualifies even in the loose sense—but it also “works,” so I’m not sure it matters! You see the point, right? “Yo” and “Ho” are both things that gangster rappers say, while pirates say “Yo ho ho” (and a bottle of rum12) and Santa says “Ho ho ho.”
The “Ho” in the central overlap is effectively “first or isolated ‘Ho’,” while the pirates–Santa overlap “Ho” is “second ‘Ho’” and the Santa-only “Ho” is “third ‘Ho.’” I think I just convinced myself it is a Venn diagram, even though the no-pirate rapper–Santa overlap is a null set. (Not all logically possible relations exist in reality!)
Astounding. Somehow, Santa does have all of these things in common with vampires, zombies, and cockroaches, each of which only partially matches the other two. (Vampires don’t, and in fact can’t, invade homes; zombies are active during the day; and cockroaches, though highly resilient as a species, aren’t immortal as individuals.)13
You’ve figured out what these three Venns have in common, right?
That last one above is obviously my favorite.14 I had to redo it, largely simply to make the colors of the circles of the two Spider-Man circles red and blue.15
Do you have any favorite examples of Venn humor? Feel free to share links in the comments!
For more on Sisyphus and his rock, see my recent Sisyphus comics post. If you like Venns, see also my other two Venn posts below, both of which I’m quite proud of, in very different ways.
The Venn of ‘Q’
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Jul 16
“You realize you’re insane” is what my middle daughter said when I showed this to her.
In informal usage, such as meming on social media, the term “Venn diagram” is widely applied to any diagram made of overlapping (or non-overlapping) circles (or other simple shapes) representing sets, with overlapping and non-overlapping areas variously labeled. Many but not all of these “Venn diagrams” actually are Venn diagrams properly speaking. To qualify as a Venn diagram, all logically possible relations among the sets must be diagrammed; every circle or set must have both overlapping and non-overlapping areas with each and all other circles or sets in every possible combination.
A Venn-like diagram in which some but not all logically possible relations are diagrammed is properly called an Euler (pronounced “oiler”) diagram and not a Venn diagram. Actually, all Venn diagrams are Euler diagrams, but not all Euler diagrams are Venn diagrams. So, for example, the image immediately below is an Euler diagram that is not a Venn, because there is no overlap, for example, specifically between “Stoners” and “Movie directors” that excludes either “D&D players” or “Bank robbers” or both, etc.
An actual four-region Venn diagram is geometrically possible, but with ellipses rather than circles; see the second image below.
You might know someone, for example, who likes Venn diagrams and draws circles around notes, but doesn’t put down coffee cups on their work, but it would only be funny to other people who know them too.
Most existing versions of this meme have give the overlap of “Talking to/Petting a dog” and “Consoling a child” as something like “(Shushing noises),” which isn’t very funny. Also, too many of them have “Starting a fight” in the top circle rather than the lower right.
Sorry, I have no snarky quip here about the Backstreet Boys. I can’t figure out how to sum up why without it sounding like a snarky quip, so.
Actually an Euler diagram, not a Venn; see note 1.
V For Vendetta includes both surveillance-state authoritarianism (Nineteen Eighty-four) plus book burning and mass-media pacification (Fahrenheit 451)?
Gattica includes both biological engineering (Brave New World) and rigid social stratification (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Bank robbers” is a punchline, and “Oh shit the cops” is funnier than “Stay in character.”
E.g., Eddie Van Halen was absolutely a smoker (and his health-related issues included cancer of the tongue, throat, and lungs). Bill Hicks was not without success as a picker. I’m pretty sure Willie Nelson is a grinner. And how the hell does Jack Nicholson not rank as a joker? (That’s a mic drop; I should have figured out how to end the post here.)
Though this always makes me think of a variant lyric sung by Yosemite Sam in Buccaneer Bunny (1948): “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Ma’s Old-Fashioned Cider, Ma’s Old-Fashioned Cider!” (A riff on a radio jingle for Dad’s Old-Fashioned Root Beer popular circa 1948, Sam’s lyric has become a baffling mondegreen for later generations of Saturday morning cartoon viewers. “Muzzle fashion cider”? “Muscle passion tiger”? “Hossenfeffer sider”? I know I watched that cartoon many times over the years before I finally heard the correct words.)
Is Santa really immortal? I mean. Shut up.
You had me at “God” and “Spider-Man.”
The original art had Spider-Man as the overlap of red and green, if you can believe it. The other red overlap was the Spanish Inquisition, which is of course correct.
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