I don’t know who came first, and I know that there are others with this exact joke, but this was the first one I have seen.
(I was unable to find the author or original source of this one.)
I tried to use tineye, and I was lead to some other news site which put me in an infinite consent-to-cookies-loop. When I finally consented, I was just directed to an archive without images.
I might have given up early, but my attempt to find the source ended there.
I don’t know who came first, and I know that there are others with this exact joke, but this was the first one I have seen.
(I was unable to find the author or original source of this one.)
The original source of that version you posted is the Berger & Wyse comic strip from The Guardian, 2 November 2013.
Found via uploading the image to tineye.com and sorting by oldest, and then using web.archive.org to navigate now-dead links it returned.
Sounds like a lot of work
It took me all of fifteen seconds or so, but I do have browser extensions for Tineye and Internet Archive which sped things up.
There’s a browser extension for Internet Archive?!
I tried to use tineye, and I was lead to some other news site which put me in an infinite consent-to-cookies-loop. When I finally consented, I was just directed to an archive without images.
I might have given up early, but my attempt to find the source ended there.
I wish to have this level of commitment.