Solution: Ha! That's a Classic!
Answer: DESECRATE
Written by Adeline Wong; with art by Jaclyn Cohen
This puzzle is about classical mythology, delivered in the form of tongue-in-cheek jokes based on specific myths. The number of blanks in each joke matches the length of the character or object that the myth features, and each myth also matches one of the pictures below. The missing names are given in alphabetical order, so ordering by the images and indexing into the name using the number of "Ha"s yields the answer, DESECRATE.
| Name | Joke | Image | "Ha"s |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASSANDRA | You won't believe how good it is | Crystal ball (Cassandra was an oracle) | 7 |
| PROCRUSTES | the punchline is a bit of a stretch | Bedframe (Procrustes was known for stretching or cutting people on an iron bed) | 9 |
| SISYPHUS | an uphill battle, but I’ll keep rolling with it | Rock (Sisyphus pushes a rock uphill for eternity) | 1 |
| PROMETHEUS | Talk about stealing my fire | Flaming presents (Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gifts it to mankind) | 5 |
| CHARON | boy, did that take a toll | Rowboat (Charon is the ferryman of the underworld, who collects tolls from his passengers) | 1 |
| MINOTAUR | half of it was utter bull | Labyrinth (The minotaur lived at the center of Daedelus's Labyrinth) | 8 |
| PYGMALION | I'm in love with how lively it's gotten | Statue (Pygmalion crafted Galatea, a statue that he fell in love with) | 5 |
| TANTALUS | the punchline always seems just out of reach | Feast table (Tantalus is surrounded by food and drink he can never touch) | 1 |
| SHIP OF THESEUS | I kept changing the wording, and now I’m not really sure it’s the same | Ship (see the Ship of Theseus) | 9 |
Author’s Notes
This mechanic was inspired by that one Orpheus and Eurydice joke, which banged around incessantly in my head until I finally snapped and wrote the puzzle. One of the very early drafts was an attempt to use classic literature (instead of classical mythology), but multi-hundred-page novels are sadly much harder to pithily summarize than stories of myth. Still, have this one just for fun:
I’ve got this really good joke about _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _—it never gets old!