Desert island joke
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The desert island joke is a recurring visual setup in gag cartoons in which one or more characters are shown stranded on a small, isolated island, typically depicted as a patch of sand with a single palm tree.
Format
Early versions of the joke often included a wrecked ship in the background or some other explanation of how the castaways arrived, giving the cartoon a narrative setup before delivering its punchline. Over the decades the imagery was simplified further and further, until the setting itself became a kind of visual shorthand: a tiny sand bar, one palm tree, and one or two stranded figures, instantly recognizable to readers without any further explanation needed. The joke itself can go in almost any direction from there, from survival absurdities to office-style workplace humor transplanted onto the island.
Popularity
Because the setup requires almost no backstory and can support an enormous range of punchlines, the desert island joke became one of the most reliable templates in magazine gag cartooning, used repeatedly across decades by many different cartoonists. Its visual economy — conveying "stranded, isolated, with nothing" in a single simple image — made it especially well suited to the single-panel format, where space for setup is limited and the joke has to land immediately.