Deconstructing Boner’s Ark

When reading the comic section of our newspaper, most people look for a quick chuckle, a clever idea amusingly related.

What they don’t want is a theological morass of the kind that Mort Walker’s Boner’s Ark introduces.

The strip started in 1968 and ran for thirty-two years, featuring the adventures of Captain Boner, a man who built an ark and placed aboard it a multitude of animals during some sort of world wide flood.

The concept for the series is completely ridiculous.

It is further assumed by Woodmorappe that the animals brought on board Boner’s ark were young, almost newborns, so as to take up less room. Interestingly, the comic seems to indicate that Boner’s ark was bigger on the inside, and since all the animals seen are for the most part full grown (with the exception of Cubcake, the Koala, identified as Boner’s nephew) it would appear the Woodmorappe’s calculations are unneeded. It is interesting to speculate on the idea that Boner, with his dimensionally transcendental ark, had somehow acquired Gallifreyan technology, but that would be beyond the purview of this article. 

It has been estimated that there were 15,746 animals aboard Boner’s ark, not counting Boner and, eventually, his wife, named Bubbles Boner. The ark had a fully functioning restaurant, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a golf course and other accommodations. But despite all this room the ark is still lacking in some necessities:

Boner carefully provisioned the ark for the animals he recruited, but he did overlook their procreational needs. To get around this Boner seems to have encouraged what I’ll euphemistically describe as “inter species relations.” The animals seem, at best, ambivalent about this situation:

Priscilla the is a female pig in a long term relationship with Dum-Dum, a gorilla, and she’s also pursuing a relationship with Duke, a penguin. As mentioned earlier, Captain Boner calls Cupcake, a Koala, his “nephew.” This kind of thing may have been popular in the heartland of America in the seventies and eighties, but our more refined, twenty-first century tastes can only react with an audible “Ew.”

There are other problems with the reality of Boner’s Ark: There’s a dinosaur named Rex on board. Is he the only dinosaur or are other species also present? Where did the steady supply of eucalyptus, the only thing a Koala can eat, come from? There’s a television in Boner’s room. What is he watching, and where is the programming broadcast from?

As becomes apparent, the raging debate over the reality of Boner’s Ark is unnecessary. Mountains of work have been produced by both sides in the debate. Looking to ancient and mythological sources, Answers in Genesis attempts to show how such a vessel could be constructed, and how animals on board could be cared for. Meanwhile, Boner’s Ark skeptics continue to pound away at the evidence.

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle.

Certainly we can assume that there was a man, possibly named Captain Boner, who built a large vessel and populated it with animals, like a sort of floating zoo. These animals almost certainly did not actually talk, and Boner would have brought along a small staff of human workers to help care for the animals. The bought could not be dimensionally transcendental, such things are found only in silly science fiction series. More likely the interior of the ark would be like this:

Such an arrangement would even allow for the addition of dinosaurs to Boner’s ark, because the ship is so roomy and seaworthy. 

I welcome any comments.