i dont understand the meaning of the bandage being a joke, but i must say i can understand the wearing of one as a prop. to me, the idea of wearing a bandage on the outside to show some sort of present affliction seems to make sense. people might think it's attention seeking, but i dont think so. it seems to me along the same lines of why people get tattoos. a desire to be seen as you are; to make an affliction a part of your identity; a way of saying "this is what i am about" or "this is where i am, now". only unlike with tattoos which are silly and which often have dumb meanings personal to the bozo who picked it out and who likely thought he was being very deep or profound at the time, we all understand what a bandage implies.
and now, to illustrate this, because i enjoy talking about myself, allow me to tell a story from my youth!
i was about 9 years old, maybe a bit younger. it was winter, in the canadian rockies. since i can remember my dad has always been ski obsessed and insisted on dragging us along on his ski trips, either because he wanted us to love it as much as him (i never succeeded in doing so), or because he himself wanted to go and didnt have anyone else to take us. well one such ski trip occured on a day when it was -30 celsius (although likely even colder than that at the top of the hill, and not to mention there was a bitter wind). about half way through the day i couldnt take it anymore and began to cry because i was that cold. my dad, in his characteristic "should-have-been-a-drill-sergeant" way, yelled at me to "toughen up". i imagine he thought i was just exaggerating (as he always has. the reason why he thought, and continues to think, this is, to this day, beyond me: i was the kind of person who would wait until i almost pissed myself before going to the bathroom because it seemed self-indulgent to want to go at the first sign of discomfort), because i didnt care about ruining his day skiing. so, to all outward appearances i "toughened up" and we continued skiing. then, on the chairlift, he noticed that i had white circles forming on my bare cheeks: frost nip. at which point he suddenly became concerned and decided, to my relief, "oh, i guess we had better go in!" (it is worth noting that now he tells a different story, one where he omits the parts where i was crying and makes himself out to be the rescuer who swoops in just in time, while i, one imagines, was blithely unaware of the cold. and, because i guess it was actually a really cold day after all he sometimes adds "man, it was stupidly cold" in a tone that implies "haha weren't we crazy being out there" as though we were all guilty of being overly zealous ski nuts).
the point of this story is that it told me that to all the outside world it often isnt enough to assert that you are in distress-- there has to be some outward manifestation of it in order for a person to be believed or validated.
so like i said, i can understand the need for an outward manifestation of a wound that cant be seen.
but as for the bandage being joke, i dont think it's particularly funny. i mean, no matter how dark your humour, there's nothing particularly funny about cancer of the esophagus, is there? especially not cancer of the ever-so-necessary esophagus of my ever-so-necessary handsome blazer man