This is a Ziggy cartoon designed to be humorous. The likelihood that a restaurant would tell a customer that their food is excellent and that the customer is eating it wrong is the reverse from what is expected so it is humor.

“Humorous” is an adjective that means

humorous
(adjective) funny, comic, amusing, entertaining, witty, merry, hilarious, ludicrous, laughable, farcical, whimsical, comical, droll, facetious, jocular, side-splitting, waggish, (jocose a humorous magazine)

hu·mor  (noun)

1. The quality that makes something laughable or amusing; funniness: could not see the humor of the situation.

2. That which is intended to induce laughter or amusement: a writer skilled at crafting humor.

3. The ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd.

See Synonyms at wit1.

4. One of the four fluids of the body, blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile, whose relative proportions were thought in ancient and medieval physiology to determine a person’s disposition and general health.

5. Physiology

a. A body fluid, such as blood, lymph, or bile.

b. Aqueous humor.

c. Vitreous humor.

6. A person’s characteristic disposition or temperament: a boy of sullen humor.

7. An often temporary state of mind; a mood: I’m in no humor to argue.

8.

a. A sudden, unanticipated whim. See Synonyms at mood1.

b. Capricious or peculiar behavior. tr.v. hu·mored, hu·mor·ing, hu·mors

1. To comply with the wishes or ideas of; indulge.

2. To adapt or accommodate oneself to. See Synonyms at pamper.

Idiom: out of humor In a bad mood; irritable.

Origin of the noun “Humor”:

[Middle English, fluid, from Old French umor, from Latin mor, hmor.]

The following meanings for HUMOR seem to describe best what the intention was of the creators of this Ziggy Cartoon:

1. The quality that makes something laughable or amusing; funniness: could not see the humor of the situation.

2. That which is intended to induce laughter or amusement: a writer skilled at crafting humor.

3. The ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd.

See Synonyms at wit1.

Synonyms: wit¹, humor, repartee, sarcasm, irony

These nouns denote forms of expression that elicit amusement or laughter.

Wit implies intellectual keenness and the ability to perceive and express in a diverting way analogies between dissimilar things: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words” (Dorothy Parker).

Humor suggests the faculty of recognizing what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd: “Man’s sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity of his profession” (Mary Roberts Rinehart).

“Repartee, sarcasm, irony” do not fit in with what we see in this Ziggy Cartoon as well as “ amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd” do for what makes this Ziggy Cartoon so funny to us.

Incongruous seems to best fit as an explanation for why this Ziggy Cartoon is perceived to be funny.

in·con·gru·ous (adjective)

1. Lacking in harmony; incompatible: a joke that was incongruous with polite conversation.
2. Not in agreement, as with principles; inconsistent: a plan incongruous with reason.
3. Not in keeping with what is correct, proper, or logical; inappropriate: incongruous behavior.
[From Latin incongruus : in-, not; see in-1 + congruus, congruous; see congruous.]
in·congru·ous·ly   (adverb).
in·congru·ous·ness (noun).

Inappropriate,and incongruous behavior is shown in what the waiter says to the restaurant customer. Most restaurants want repeat business and a good reputation so that new customers will come in. This must be a genuinely positive experience just to keep the restaurant in business. No waiter in the waiter’s right mind would ever say,”The Mahi-Mahi is excellent, sir. … You must be eating it wrong.”

This Ziggy Cartoon is perceived to be humorous and funny because it is incongruous. Because the Ziggy Cartoon is  not in keeping with what is correct, proper, or logical, it is funny or we may perceive it to be humorous because the likelihood that what is depicted in this Ziggy Cartoon most likely will not happen.  Because the situation is so absurd, we can laugh at the situation. Any restaurant waiter who may make a statement to a customer such as “The Mahi-Mahi is excellent, sir. … You must be eating it wrong.”

This Ziggy Cartoon presents the viewer with a situation that is absurd. It is funny!!!

Some situations that are incongruous and absurd aren’t so funny although they may be very similar to this Ziggy cartoon. In the first place, no one believes that a restaurant would act this way and stay in business. On the other hand, if a business treat their customer base in this manner, it would still be absurd, ridiculous and incongruous, but not funny because it is real.

This was my real lived experience and I would like to warn others so that what happened to me will never happen to them.

(Anyone who chooses of their own accord to be tricked or to be taken advantage of may do so, but they should understand the consequences of what they are doing before undertaking this kind of venture.)

Absurd is an adjective that conveys a message that is inconsistent with reason or logic or even with common sense.

The Ziggy Cartoon presents the viewer with a situation that is absurd. It would be ridiculous for a waiter to say such a thing. The waiter would have to be crazy to say such a thing if the restaurant is to stay in business and make money.

Customer service needs to be “smart, wise, reasonable, intelligent, sensible, rational, logical, prudent, sagacious” no matter what the service is that is being given. If customers are told that they have acted improperly so that it is not the fault of the business something is very wrong with the business practices. Proper customer service is completely lacking.

And yet, this is what META PAYMENT SYSTEMS told me.

1. Meta Bank had sent me a check to my home address in March, but told me in July that they didn’t have my mailing address because I hadn’t given it to them.

2. Meta Bank took $5000 in my cash money and failed to reload my META BANK VISA PREPAID BANK CARD, a travel card. It the process of reloading the META BANK card, the woman on the phone from META BANK asked where I would be traveling and when I would be leaving. META BANK accepted my cash money of $5,000.00 but they didn’t load my prepaid bank card. Instead META BANK held onto my money when I needed it the most. When I got back from being overseas on what was to have been a trip of a life time, META BANK was pushing the blame off on me their former customer

a. They blamed me for going to the manager of the store where I bought the META BANK PREPAID CARD who then phoned META BANK using her own personal contact phone numbers. A polite woman said that she didn’t have the answer, but that she would call me by 5:30 PM that same night. She never phoned me.

b. I phoned the number on the card at 5:30 PM eastern time. META BANK is headquartered in Storm Lake, Iowa and it is on Central Time. As a customer I was put on hold for long periods of time. I was shifted from person to person. The META BANK representatives were constantly trying to put the blame on me, my spouse, the manager of the store where I bought the card for the problem that was really their doing and of their own creation, by design.

i. They said that my spouse had given them the wrong number for the cards to be re-loaded. My spouse only had one number for the PREPAID BANK TRAVEL CARD BY META BANK. My spouse was not the owner of the other card. The cards have to be signed on the back. Why? That now in retrospect also seems to be incongruous with what META BANK representatives had been programmed to say regarding customer service.

ii. They said that the store manager had given them the wrong number of which of the two prepaid bank cards was to be re-loaded. I knew that in the email that I had sent with the only number that I had was copied correctly into an email from overseas.

iii. A selling feature of the METABANK Prepaid card was that the two cards would both be loaded at the same time. Two people would have access to the money according to METABANK’s own rules. Actually, this was to become part of the METABANK Scam.The cards had to be signed on the back by the people who were the registered owners of the card. META BANK’s probable intent from the start was to confuse the card owners about what and how much had been spent. However, METABANK was to have loaded both cards at the same time according to their own guidelines. META BANK representatives said that they had not been told which card to re-load. This was a lie. They were told several times the exact number on the precise card that was to be re-loaded.

iv. Meta Bank complained that I had not contacted them again from overseas either by phone or via email to tell them that the card wouldn’t work after I had my spouse work to get the card reloaded once I first discovered that the card wouldn’t work over seas.

a. I had no further access to phones or to email once I left the capital city.

b. In the capital when the card wouldn’t work, I went to speak with a local banker ( you know the kind who sit in the offices off to the side). That banker told me that the physical formatting of the METABANK VISA PREPAID BANK CARD, sold as a travel card to be used overseas, was incompatible with the cards used in the rest of the world. I then knew that I had a big problem.

c. Upon arrival in the first American Airport on my journey home, I tried to use the METABANK PREPAID TRAVEL CARD again. TGIFridays ran the card through their machine several times and it wouldn’t work.

d. I had very little in cash to live on because I had fallen for the METABANK PUBLICITY that the prepaid bank cards are safer than carrying cash.

v. Meta Bank said that when I had cashed out my prepaid card that a late request for payment had been made which had put me into an overdraft situation and because they didn’t have any contact information for me ( a lie) they couldn’t alert me to the overdraft situation

a. When I was in the process of reloading the card and the META BANK Representative had my file opened up in front of her why didn’t she point that out to me so that I could have corrected it?

b. Meta Bank said that they couldn’t re-load my card because of the outstanding balance of $24 +/-. However, when I was cashing out the card from the first time we had traveled with it, I had been asked the last date and the last amount that I spent using the card. I was informed that META BANK would wait one or two months before sending me my cash out money so they could be sure that all of the debits to that card had arrived….. The amount that they said was outstanding is the exact amount and the place where I had told them that I had last used the card.

Yes, this was a scam. META BANK PREPAID BNK CARD’s design is to hold onto a customer’s cash money for as long as they can; it is an interest free loan to META BANK.

While META BANK seeks to serve the underbanked which means the more risky banking customers so that they can charge them higher interest rates and make huge profits from these people who are a poor credit risk by leading them on with empty promises. This is by design just so META BANK can make money off of the most vulnerable members of our society; they will not have the resources to fight back.

Plus META BANK REPRESENTATIVES have been taught and instructed how to lie to their own customer base; they may be helping to scam people who are a lot like them.

Nobody likes to admit that they have been taken to the cleaners. We are all vulnerable to these predatory banking practices.

vi. Only months after I was scammed by METABANK, I met another person who couldn’t get their METABANK PREPAID TRAVEL CARD to work. A university representative and a well educated person, and META BANK said that he had not used the card properly….

Absurd is an adjective that conveys a message that is inconsistent with reason or logic or even with common sense. This describes how I was treated as a customer of META BANK.

There was nothing funny or amusing about my experience with METABANK

… This is a lot like the Ziggy Cartoon and what the waiter says to his customer, but there is nothing humorous about what META BANK does to their customer base. On two levels, META is destroying their own customer base:

1. META BANK gets another corporate entity to market their prepaid bank cards for METABANK so a customer may think they are doing business with that other corporate entity and not with META BANK. The corporate partner who has sold the META BANK PREPAID BANK CARDS will lose the confidence they may have once had with their own customers. In this way the corporate partners who push the METABANK PREPAID Bank cards lose their own customer base that it may have taken years to build up.

2. Any person who has been scammed by METABANK and who does any minimal research on METABANK will realize that they want to be NO PART of any system that is promoted by METABANK.

Because METABANK offers many forms of their card, along with the same lousy customer service using different publicity targeted to the next chump, it seems that all prepaid bank cards are not favorable for customers:

a. Prepaid Cards are not safer than using cash.

b. Prepaid Cards are designed so that a customer will always leave some money on them. This is how the bank providing the prepaid bank cards make their big money. You are giving them a loan, interest free.

– No bank would give any customer a loan interest free.

– Why then would a customer give a bank an interest free loan? Perhaps that person hasn’t fully understood what is being done to them.

PROPOSAL:

All loans should carry the exact same interest rates. Then banks wouldn’t be seeking out people who are bad credit risks to lend them money.

Prepaid Bank Cards are not for the benefit of the consumer; they should be removed from the market. Why in this downturned economy would anyone give a gift card as a present to anyone?????!!!! It is just a really bad idea for the giver and especially for the receiver. Sometimes hidden costs are in getting the card to work.

METABANK has set themselves up to be the primary dispenser of all PREPAID BANK CARDS and all PREPAID GIFT CARDS. Any card that you get that is a form of debit card where your own money is tied up is managed by METABANK or by a bank that has been instructed or trained by METABANK as to how to do this kind of operation.

The banking industry is creating all of the rules and retaining the right to change the rules at any time during the contract without notice to the customer.

METABANK’s practices are ludicrous, incongruous, inappropriate and devious. METABANK’s customer service is absurd.

There is nothing funny about the way that METABANK does business. META BANK’s practices are nothing more than a form of predatory lending…. a scam on the general public.

The only thing that I can do as an individual is to warn my neighbors so that what happened to me will never happen again to even one other person.

Meta Bank isn’t looking out for your best interests; Meta Bank is only looking to make more money in anyway they can.