Shashi Tharoor's 'Exasperating Farrago Of Distortions' is Now a Captain Haddock Dialogue in Tintin Comics

While reading Tintin, the characters of the famous comic book often seemed to be real-life people. It wasn't very difficult to imagine that in some far-away corner of the world was a young journalist and his dog would solve mysteries with a little help from Professor Calculus and Captain Haddock.

Their adventures would take them to places like Egypt, The Congo, and also India! And while Tintin was the protagonist, and every other character had something special about them - Captain Haddock probably stood out from the rest.

Captain Haddock with his sailor ways, his uncontrollable rage and his constant tirade of gibberish that came with the rage has always been memorable - as "blistering barnacles" and "thundering typhoons" has always been a Captain Haddock constant.

Though these phrases made no-sense to most people, they were still valid as sentences and phrases - they conveyed meaning even though they seemed non-sensical to most. This is very similar to when Shashi Tharoor in May of 2017 tweeted, "Exasperating farrago of distortions" which quickly became a meme, right after.

Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations&outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalst

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) May 8, 2017

The term 'farrago' even peaked in Google search results.

Farrago on Google search after the Tharoor tweet. pic.twitter.com/2NUMcfjjZ4 — Aashish Chandorkar (@c_aashish) May 8, 2017

And while it's been over a year that the meme has remained constant, along with showing up at occasional points where people using the phrase to describe an absurd or situation which isn't easily understandable.

Shashi Tharoor on Twitter shared a picture of Captain Haddock saying this very popular phrase in his speech bubble, amidst very Captain Haddock-y things.

As a childhood Tintin fan in both English & French, I love this! (Don't take the advice too literally though!) pic.twitter.com/kNeSqYmzIY

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) October 5, 2018

The original image is from the French version of Tintin, where Captain Haddock as usual, states gibberish in his rage. The Twitter version was created by Twitter user Mixed Raita.



While the memes have been constant, someone making this image of Captain Haddock itself is a new take on his very popular phrase. The image is made well, especially since Tintin, who is a journalist asks Haddock to "stop following that Tharoor fella" after he says it was "masquerading as a journalist."