I thought of the basic premise for this cartoon one evening while I was eating dinner at home with my husband. We have a lot of those proverbial "kitchen table" conversations about the economy. It occurred to me that this recession -- or possibly depression -- was happening at the height of the Age of Irony. News gets quickly processed by the Onion, "Daily Show," Stephen Colbert and purveyors of wacky T-shirts. And cartoonists, I might add! We like to think we're post-everything. Yet no matter how much we try to encompass a situation through ridicule, some problems don't reduce to kitsch all that easily.

There's something very poignant about this. You can make fun of losing your job, but you still need to eat. This is not to say we shouldn't employ humor during difficult times -- far from it! But it has some limitations. It's worth remembering that people declared irony dead after Sept. 11, and we saw how long that lasted. So I'm fully confident we will continue to laugh all the way through the Great Depression 2.0: Revenge of the Credit Default Swaps, especially when there are so many CEOs deserving of mockery.

The $150 Bear Stearns T-shirt in the second panel is based on a true story. Someone actually paid that much for one on eBay, shortly after Bear's collapse. Swag from defunct companies instantly becomes "vintage." Or, at least that's what the eBay sellers want you to think.

You'll notice in the fourth panel, the girl is Twittering from a soup kitchen. I'm quite certain some people would give up food before they gave up their cellphones. I can't imagine how the Okies got through the 1930s without the ability to broadcast the mundane details of their westward migration!

This cartoon received a favorable response from readers, though interestingly, more than one zeroed in on a tiny background gag in the third panel: the billboard reading "The Grapes of Snark." They found that to be the funniest part of the whole cartoon. That's how it goes sometimes.

-- Interview conducted and condensed by Michael Cavna