42: Geico

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Geico
Original title: Monday's Drawing: Geico
David did thisOriginal caption: Current Mood:  sick
Title text: David did this

Original caption: Current Mood: sick.gif sick

Explanation[edit]

This was the thirty-eighth comic originally posted to LiveJournal. The previous one was 35: Sheep, and the next one was 38: Apple Jacks.

This comic references a long-running ad campaign for Geico insurance in which a character (different in each commercial) lists a series of horrible events or news, but then caps it off with "but I've got good news: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico" – news that may be good, but is usually either trivial compared to the magnitude of the preceding bad news, or else is said to the person whom all of the preceding bad news applied to, giving them false hope that the good news was for them. It became a recognizable pop culture phrase. In this one-panel comic, Cueball parodies the punchline by saving money on his car insurance by intimidation, instead of choosing the best provider. A golf club would later also be used for similarly socially unacceptable actions in 81: Attention, shopper, and Geico's ad would be mentioned again in 870: Advertising.

In the title text, Randall attributes this comic to the unknown friend David. He does the same in 51: Malaria and 100: Family Circus. We can assume (or rather, we can hope) that "this" refers to the act of writing the comic, as opposed to the act of threatening his insurance agent.

Transcript[edit]

[Cueball holding a golf club.]
Cueball: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by threatening my agent with a golf club.

Trivia[edit]

This is the first xkcd comic featuring David.


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Discussion

Is David a reference to David and Goliath? 108.162.254.169 09:14, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, and maybe there is an other pun: The US Volkswagen Rabbit is named Golf in Europe and many other countries. A small car owner (Rabbit/Golf/David) fights against the big company (Geico/Goliath).--Dgbrt (talk) 20:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
No. 108.162.219.58 01:28, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
No. 108.162.219.58 01:28, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

I would not be surprised to find that the David in this (and other) comics is in fact David Throne. 173.245.54.194 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Is "No laughing, 'less you want some of this too! *hefts golf club menacingly*" really a hint to him being sick? And isn't him himself saying that he is sick a much bigger hint? I don't think there's much value in writing that there then, but I didn't just delete it, because it contains some information. Fabian42 (talk) 07:51, 26 October 2017 (UTC)