#22 - WTF

The sentence in the first panel means "Give, I'll grind (the grain), you rest". It is the earliest recorded example of the Polish language, written in a monastic history book in the late thirteenth century. (Details here.) It is a phrase known to almost all Poles.

The joke is that the man, whose short hair identifies him as a lower-class, uneducated person, not only can't understand his own culture, but expresses his incomprehension in crude foreign slang. Cultural colonization by the Anglosphere continues apace.

#21 - Cow thought

Not much to say about this one except that I find it gets funnier each time I look at it.

#20 - Left and Right

Man with microphone: Who do you love more, daddy or mommy?

As mentioned in the previous post, Raczowski often portrays amoral drunks and rigid pietists. Here he puts them together to draw a humorous contrast. The child, as so often in his work, is put on the spot. This is one of the first cartoons of his I encountered.

Raczkowski must have liked this image because he used it again:

Child: What's that mean, "left wing" and "right wing"?

I have no idea which version came first. Note that the clouds are different. This version makes the point explicitly political: from a simple, honest point of view, that of a child, the left are selfish slobs, the right, crazed religionists. Again, a joke made about Polish culture that is relevant in many, many other countries.

#19 - Feast of the Three Drunks

There is a Polish custom on Epiphany in which people chalk the letters "K+M+B" and the year on their front door as a sign of religious faith for the coming year. The letters stand for the traditional names of the three Magi who visited Christ in the manger: Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar. Raczkowski contrasts the pious person with his neighbour, who has chalked instead the formula for ethanol (drinking alcohol) on his door. Portraying piety and alcoholism as two dominant tendencies in Polish society is a familiar Raczkowskian trope, and the next post will feature one of his funniest renditions.

#18 - The birth of God

#17 - Toiletvision

#16 - Man hands on misery to man

This Be The Verse

by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

#15 - Everything must go

#14 - Obscene graffito

Old lady: "That's disgusting!"

Word for word it's "What for (a) piggery!" - a Polish idiom that expresses disgust. Prudish old ladies, known in the UK as the "blue rinse brigade" and in Poland, as I have just found out, as "mohair berets", are a stock Raczkowski target.

#13 - Voodoo economics

#1: Explain to me why we don't have any money even though we made the Philosopher's Stone.

#2: It's because we invest all the profits in perpetual motion research.


Here I read - in addition to the obvious gag - a sly joke about how the fruits of economic growth rarely seem to trickle down into the hands of ordinary people.

#12 - God is gay

#11 - Patriotism

Father: You won't get drunk for your country, you little shit?

Ojczyzna is more literally "fatherland", but of course without the connotations that word has for Anglophones. Gówniarz is something like "shitter", pretty vulgar. Raczkowski is fond of drawing connections between loud patriotism and various sorts of crass or thuggish behaviour. A parent terrorising a child is also a common motif.

10 Mar 2015: I changed the translation on the suggestion of an anonymous commenter.