There's a thin line between slapstick and tragedy, says thinker's comedian Stewart Lee in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.

"Lamia":  an illustration from a 1900 issue of The Idler magazine and a precursor to the spooky portraits hanging in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

Before Andy Warhol made his famous pronouncement, the polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (b. 1742) noted, "Everyone is a genius at least once a year."  (Lichtenberg added that "real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.")

An illustration from a 1905 issue of Wide World magazine.  The caption reads: "I was soon enveloped in the fiery tongues of flame."

Before Arrested Development introduced us to the fictional self-help book The Man Inside Me (2004), there was The Man Inside (1914).

"For there's a man inside me, and only when he's finally out, can I walk free of pain." —Dr. Tobias Fünke

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Metropolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "'Through him!  Pass through him!  Come out!  Come to me!' I cried."

"It bears repeating that any exercise is good, even if it's a walk or a slow swim."
—Laura Riley, You and Your Baby Pregnancy

Here's the secret meaning of the Queen of Diamonds*: "Don't desire to be high-prized."  From The Idler, 1895.

*Note the diamond motif at the queen's feet.

"The answer is simple. Vermouth is not evil.”

—The Mixellany Guide to Vermouth & Other Aperitifs (2012)

I dreamed again I was allowed to marry another semicolon.  Our wedding was conducted by San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren, who kept saying, "I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal ... That semicolon is a big deal."

Later that night, I dreamed that I discussed my marriage with Rick Boyer, who said: "Like punctuation marks, milestones break up, to a degree, the continuity of daily experience.  And like those little black marks, they add dimensions to the text of our lives, extra meaning that otherwise we would fail to read.  Nate's upcoming wedding day, like a speed bump, to some degree sneaked up on us despite the fact that we've been looking forward to it.  What is it about weddings, anyway?  You have one marked on the calendar for perhaps a year or two; yet, two weeks before the event all is madness and pandemonium as both families scramble to get ready. ... Our coming 'big day' reminds me that milestones - those punctuation marks of life - are liberally dispersed for all and that life is not one uninterrupted stream but a book with a beginning and an end.  It has sentences and paragraphs, set apart by punctuation marks, that add up to chapters which sometimes we don't recognize as such until looking back later over the nearly completed manuscript."

An illustration from a 1918 issue of Life magazine.

Even though modern eyes might consider the young lady's skirt to be quite long (in the image below), she's wearing the "short skirt now in vogue," making her vulnerable to casting a disreputable shadow.  We generally love that one might be scandalized by one's shadow.  A true character must cast a fascinating shadow, one way or another.  Note that the tricky "witching hour" here is sunset and not midnight.

Jeff shares:

An illustration from an 1892 issue of The Idler magazine.  The caption reads: "Baby Smithson loved me."

Here's a precursor to filmmaker John Waters "jumping the shark."

By the time audiences and auteurs settled into the ’80s, America’s look back in affection at the ’50s had begun to show its age. (When Fonzie jumped the shark in an episode of "Happy Days,” his daredevil stunt soon became shorthand for that precise moment in time when a beloved piece of pop culture begins to overstay its welcome). That didn’t stop "Pope of Trash” John Waters from mining the world of downscale greasers for 1990’s "Cry-Baby.” —Scott Stiffler

Our precursor appears in Frederick Upham Adams' The Kidnapped Millionaires: A Tale of Wall Street and the Tropics (1901).

What strikes us about this item from The Wide World Magazine (1908) is where, exactly, the mysterious figure in question suddenly disappeared.  Note that two locations are mentioned:

1. "Denver, Colorado"
2. "Denver (Colorado)"

How many people — dozens, hundreds, or dare we suggest thousands? — have suddenly disappeared in "Denver (Colorado)"?

Our very serious advice: Do not enter parenthetical locations frivolously.  Neither a trail of breadcrumbs nor GPS software will be of any service.

If you ever open a bottle and hear a hissing sound, stand back.  This snaky letter S is from Sunday magazine, 1875.