A brown leather glove and a blue knitted glove lie tangled together on wood.

Original artwork, not a still

Mostly Harmless  ·  1992

Douglas Adams

It wasn’t merely that their left hand didn’t always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

This stretches an old saying about coordination into something funnier and bleaker. Not only did one hand not know what the other was doing, but neither hand had much idea either, doubling the absurdity of the original phrase. The joke compounds confusion into comedy.

Context reviewed

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