Based on my experiences and those of many other people during the Jamaican stop of JoCo Cruise Crazy, this is what I imagine might happen if Count Rugen (the six-fingered man) from The Princess Bride were Jamaican. No offense to any people, real or fictitious, is intended.
If you’re not familiar with The Princess Bride, or you weren’t on JoCo Cruise Crazy and have never been to Ocho Rios, never fear. I’ve included a humour-crushing explanation of all the jokes and who they were stolen from below the comic.
For the bewildered:
Frame 1 is probably one of the most repeated and therefore most famous lines from The Princess Bride. If you don’t understand it, this might help. But seriously, maybe it’s time you saw or read The Princess Bride.
Frames 2 and 3, apart from showing the typical sales tactic in Ocho Rios, also make reference to the paid assassin in ‘My Monster‘, which was performed by Bill Corbett and Joseph Scrimshaw on the ship. The line ‘People don’t die cheap’ is from that. Many of us got our hair braided in Ocho Rios, but it was Kevin Murphy who suggested braided beards.
The last frame primarily references this scene from The Princess Bride, although I have the character Westley saying it instead of Fezzik, so that I can then reference ‘Shut up, Wesley!‘ which was apparently a common reaction to the character of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wil Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher, was one of the entertainers on the cruise.
The giant finger painted on the back of the boat was suggested by Mike Phirman during the ‘Hey Hey… I’m an Asshole!‘ quiz show the morning after our day in Jamaica. You can see it around 19 minutes and 48 seconds into this video.
Just in case anyone was offended or scared away from Jamaica by this comic, I don’t mean to imply that any actual Jamaicans would kill your father and then ask for a tip. In reality they would merely do things such as carving your name on a supposed free gift you didn’t want before demanding money for it. And I’m sure not all Jamaicans even do that, or if they do, that it’s just a part of their culture which I would get used to if I stayed longer than a day. Still, at the end of the day I was certainly very wary and weary of it.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the day at all. Jamaica was the low point of the cruise in the same sense that the perigee of the International Space Station is a low point.
By the way, I’m perfectly aware that the characters are standing in mid-air or on a railing in the first two frames, and Count Rugen changes colour in subsequent frames. If I’d had a better photo with ‘Welcome to Ocho Rios’ on it, and any illusions of being able to draw well, I might have tried to fix that. Instead, I stuck with what I had drawn on a leisurely evening with my iPad in a café-bookshop.
Also, I can’t remember whether the touristic signs in Jamaica used ‘Da’ or ‘De’ for ‘the’, and the wikipedia articles on Jamaican English and Jamaican patois don’t seem to say one way or the other. I suspect there is no official spelling. So I went with ‘Da’ in the title of this post; if that’s not correct, I’d love to hear why.
Creative Output 