structural:scholar_edition, stylistic:tone
In cartoons

Cartoonists, both editorial and pure humorists, have often used proverbs, sometimes primarily building on the text, sometimes primarily on the situation visually, the best cartoons combining both. Not surprisingly, cartoonists often twist proverbs, such as visually depicting a proverb literally or twisting the text as an anti-proverb. An example with all of these traits is a cartoon showing a waitress delivering two plates with worms on them, telling the customers, "Two early bird specials... here ya go."

The traditional Three wise monkeys were depicted in Bizarro with different labels. Instead of the negative imperatives, the one with ears covered bore the sign "See and speak evil", the one with eyes covered bore the sign "See and hear evil", etc. The caption at the bottom read "The power of positive thinking." Another cartoon showed a customer in a pharmacy telling a pharmacist, "I'll have an ounce of prevention." The comic strip The Argyle Sweater showed an Egyptian archeologist loading a mummy on the roof of a vehicle, refusing the offer of a rope to tie it on, with the caption "A fool and his mummy are soon parted." The comic One Big Happy showed a conversation where one person repeatedly posed a part of various proverb and the other tried to complete each one, resulting in such humorous results as "Don't change horses... unless you can lift those heavy diapers."

Editorial cartoons can use proverbs to make their points with extra force as they can invoke the wisdom of society, not just the opinion of the editors. In an example that invoked a proverb only visually, when a US government agency (GSA) was caught spending money extravagantly, a cartoon showed a black pot labeled "Congress" telling a black kettle labeled " GSA ", "Stop wasting the taxpayers' money!" It may have taken some readers a moment of pondering to understand it, but the impact of the message was the stronger for it.

Cartoons with proverbs are so common that Wolfgang Mieder has published a collected volume of them, many of them editorial cartoons. For example, a German editorial cartoon linked a current politician to the Nazis, showing him with a bottle of swastika-labeled wine and the caption " In vino veritas ".

One cartoonist very self-consciously drew and wrote cartoons based on proverbs for the University of Vermont student newspaper The Water Tower, under the title "Proverb place".