Are there tongues involved? Guess we’ll never know, thanks to the clipboard
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Luann, 3/19/25
Looks like Luann’s 40th anniversary celebration is going to roll on all week, or maybe for the rest of the month, who even knows at this point, but today anyway real Luann heads are urged see the Luann 40th vid at LuannFan dot com, your source for Luann content on the World Wide Web. Do you want to watch some Luann vids? Huh? Do you want to watch Luann and some guy named “Phil” or whatever smooch chastely behind a clipboard while Tiffany watches them and cracks wise? Do you? Do you want to watch that? Are you a sick freak and that’s the sort of thing that gets you off? Well I guess you should go on over to LuannFan dot com, then, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
Andy Capp, 3/19/25
I of course rely on Andy Capp for all my up-to-the-minute information about British culture, so I’m intrigued to learn that that accursèd island’s most hardened criminals have given up on their former pursuits — knifecrime or ASBOs or what have you — and have instead embraced pub trivia fraud. Truly Charles III’s depraved dominion never rests when it comes to developing new forms of malice!
Dennis the Menace, 3/19/25
I genuinely love the absolutely blank expressions Dennis and Margaret are giving Mr. Wilson here. Sorry, George, that insult absolutely did not land, you should probably workshop it some more. Good thing you’ve got nothing but time on your hands!
82 replies to “Are there tongues involved? Guess we’ll never know, thanks to the clipboard”
Ah, but Josh, you’re Mr. Wilson all the time. When has any of your jokes landed?
DtM: With timeline drift, Dennis and Margaret are among the youngest members of Generation Alpha and as such, have no comprehension of Mr. Wilson’s crude 1950s gender stereotypes. Sorry, “homemaker”? We’re going to be living in a genderfluid polycule commune where all tasks are shared equitably! The future is now, old man!
The Ghost Who FOOBS: When you can skullpunch, you don’t need to acceot the nuance of “age of consent”.
(BTW, in the Sunday strips, does OG Kit Jr. take a child bride?)
Curtis: HA HA HA Illiteracy sucks! I am SMRTer!
GT: Luke’s regressed into asshole mode.
DtM: Martha’s not even listening as she keeps scrolling through her dating app.
Luann:
The blood drive has brought celebration
And now, runaway admiration
But readers will stray
‘Cause their PDA
Involves unrestrained osculation!
Luann: And we thought Blandthony was dull.
DtM: It shut them up momentarily, so as far as Wilson’s concerned, it’s a win.
MW: “Dear Wendy,
Not being bored cross-eyed by ‘Mary Worth’ would be a wholly unexpected situation. What should I do if that happens?”
RMMD: “Thanks for offering to stay, after I brought it up, begged you to do it, hung my head demurely and whimpered in my helpless little voice. ”
9CL: What is Amos doing, licking the floor?
GT: Does this strip rotate illustrators, or is there only one, who occasionally uses their non-dominant hand, just for kicks?
Luann – Very good – now that we’re speaking in tongues, the next step is rolling with the spirit….
Andy Capp – Now if you’re an East Ender, I’m sure this must be hilarious….
DtM – The punctilious and cavalier – thanks for the thesaurus, Martha….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Pretty big talk coming from Luann
DtM: Margaret starts explaining that she’s not a carpenter while Dennis gets his father’s sledgehammer out of the shed.
GT: Coach Martinez wears his severed hand necklace to drive home the point about dealing with enemies.
The Evansi long for the days of the Hays Code…
MW: Has Moy evolved into her final form? No more plot lines, just Mary directly lecturing the audience?
GT: Remember that time Keri punched Britney in the face? Because none of these characters do.
RMMD: Beatty managing to make a stalking plot boring is the biggest disappointment since the time he made falling off a cruise ship boring, which is the biggest disappointment since he made a wannabe superhero boring, which is the biggest disappointment since…
George, look, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but if you hate Dennis so much — which you do, and rightfully so — maybe don’t sit on the top of the porch steps like you and the wife are apparently doing, thus making it that much easier for the little nimrod to hunt you down. Then again, that’s easy for me to say, I still have the lower half of my body, maybe I should check my privilege.
GA:. An ambulance? Why an ambulance just st because the power’s off. Oh wait, ambulances aren’t black.
MW:. Yikes. That’s what I tell friends, always have a plan B. Whatta jerk I’ve become.
PLUGGERS:. OTOH, at least I’m not today’s Plugger.
CURTIS:. It’s all in the base group you’ve chosen to measure yourself. Lest I sound like MW again, compare yourself to successes.
“This seven-year-old girl is a tradwife and this six-year-old boy has adulterous affairs”? Mr. Wilson, I don’t like your fantasies at all.
This is not the Andy Capp I remember. Oh, sure — he has near-empty (and, I would assume, room-temperature) ale in front of him, but where’s the indecipherable British slang and wife-beating? You could at least drop an “h” or two, dude!
Luann: Cheat notes on a clipboard for your first kiss sounds ludicrous but you do you, Luann.
@Yesyouarejoshthedumb2ss:
#1. Yesyouare, jealousy is not really entertaining to read. Everyone else, just ignore them.
RMMD: “Summer, I like to sleep in the nude. That won’t be a problem, will it?”
Arrgh, I caught just the first snippet of dialogue in Luann — “You’d be OK if we kissed again?” — and then was immediately distracted by the site cookies warning with its big yellow button stating “Yes, I’m okay with this!” But I am not okay with this, joshreads.com, it is against all that is holy and the sex-negative spirit of both Luann and Luann. I’m not okay, do you hear me, I’ll never be okay with this!
@Activist: I really like the spirit of someone who not only reads the posts daily, but reads them early, just to be sure they can insult the writer with stupid, juvenile taunts. There’s something beautifully deformed about it, and very fitting for our current age of resentment.
LUANN: Aw, poor naive Luann: This is her idea of “the fuck hut” from Tiffany’s dorm (this is the only version her simple sanitized, sterilized mind can handle.)
Dennis the Menace: While George reads the paper for his insults, Martha is busy combing her pocket-size Bible. “I think you mean ‘Jezebel’ and “Absalom,’ dear.”
DENNIS THE MENACE: Psst Don’t share your porn scenarios with 6 year-olds, dude.
I wasn’t around to mock yesterday’s Pluggers until late, but yes, can verify: “The Price Is Right” is paws-down the choice of game shows in memory care units.
(In case you’re wondering, and I know you are, the order of popularity of television programs left on for noise in nursing homes is something like:
1. The Price is Right
2. Any other game show
3. Little House on the Prairie
4. MSNBC
5. Fox News*
6. Gunsmoke)
*Fox News might be more popular with the older set, but MSNBC is a little less angry-making.
Dennis the Menace: I am just realizing after all these years the multilayer nature of Hank Ketcham’s strip. Sure Dennis is an annoying little tyke who aggravates Mr. Wilson in wholesome ways. However, today we see the pair of Margaret and Dennis are really the younger versions of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. Margaret will grow less annoying and become the grandmotherly home maker; while Dennis in his dotage will trade menacing for world weary crankiness. The blank look on the young ones’ faces is the same dawning realization of what they will become. Oh, the horror! The horror.
@Everything is Better with Monkeys:
I would read the hell out of pre-code Luann. And pre-code Gil Thorp, Rex Morgan, and Mary Worth.
@Lauralot: GT: More likely that with the strip’s art deterioration, none of the characters can tell who punched whom. They’re lucky if they can keep track of who they are from panel to panel.
DT: “And who might YOU be, Mr Leprechaun Man? You just waking up from your St. Pat’s bender?”
DtM: How long were Dennis and Margaret standing there before Wilson put his paper down and noticed them? They’re like those little demon kids in Japanese horror films. Wilson freezes them in their tracks with a vaudeville counter spell.
DTM: “Ah, it’s the two five year olds I regularly hang out with: the one that reminds me of a traditionalist married woman and the one who reminds me of someone who has affairs with married people!” – Mr Wilson, shortly before going on the sex offenders register.
Andy Capp: I’ve done some pub quizzes in Andy’s neck of the woods (Teesside, North East England’s answer to Pittsburgh) and I think this is 50% accurate. Crooked Colin would definitely go, and definitely cheat, but there’s 0% chance his team wouldn’t be called the Pheasant Pluckers, the Cunning Stunts, or the Mary Hinges.
Dennis the Menace-Mr. Wilson, the term is homewrecker.
FC-You think you have problems Mommy has a whole crowd in her hands.
RMMD-“I’ve paid the stalker just enough so I can be the big hero.”
MW-Mary has the expression of someone finding it difficult to believe their own bullshit.
Have we ever seen Margaret and Mr. Wilson interact before? Because that’s clearly a “Who is this asshole?” look on her face in the second panel.
***
Are the pub quiz cheaters using Bing instead of the increasingly worsening so it’s okay to use it in these circumstances Google?
Luann: Serious question: is Phil supposed to be neurodivergent? He seems heavily reliant on rules for personal interactions, which is a common way of managing the condition.
Memo From the Editor
to: Wilbur Weston:
As per the AP Stylebook: in newspaper writing, an ellipsis should only be used to condense quotations. It should never be used to indicate a pause in speech or an unfinished thought. The stylebook indicates that if the shortened sentence before the mark can stand as a sentence, it should do so. On a related note, your Ask Wendy columns of late don’t at all read like your usual submissions. Are you still actually writing this column?
DtM: Martha is surreptitiously filming this exchange for her YouTube channel, “Obnoxious shit my husband says to six-year-olds.”
“Homebreaker”? George seems unhealthily jealous of the time Dennis spends with Martha.
GT: Why does coach Martinez have hands growing out of his neck?
I don’t get Mr Wilson’s “joke” either, and I’m not a kid.
Someone in comics finally mentions my real name, and it has the addendum “Crooked” in front of it? Don’t know whether to be insulted or happy I’m finally recognized.
ACapp: I’m betting he got that crooked colon in prison.
I have to admit I don’t hang out in pubs on quiz night, but do they typically involve people filling out little scan-tron forms with #2 pencils like that? I feel like logistically that’s the last way you’d want to handle a quiz in a pub.
“. . . and tonight, on BBC 666, from within the boundless white void, it’s Andy Capp!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: It’s sad but almost funny, that this troll can only dish out insults as if he’s a fifth grader on the playground.
I know of trolls who can really dish out the pain, so in turn this guy just saying “Haha, you suck Josh” really is lame and pathetic.
Zits:
Symphony In Salami, by Jeremy Duncan, 2025.
Luann – If stuck in an eternal youth role, I would choose Zits or Archie ahead of Luann, but it does beat being Wilbur Weston’s forever community college student daughter Dawn.
Andy Capp – I never lived in a city where Andy Capp was in the comics section of the newspaper, and mostly knew the character because of the “Fries” snacks sold in convenience stores. But I feel like for all intents and purposes, Andy Capp could be Snuffy Smith’s stereotypical lower-class British cousin, and visa-versa. Pub trivia fraud and cheating at poker share the same genetic origin for criminality.
Dennis – The joke only works if you recall that George Wilson was a mailman his career, and thus had daily access (except Sundays and federal holidays) to lonely housewives. This is a highly inappropriate joke to say when it involves 5 year-olds
@Buck Ripsnort: Jihadi Colin greets you, namebrother.
DtM: Homebreaker in the metaphorical sense. George knows what Dennis doesn’t – Henry has had enough of the boy and is leaving Alice.
@Philip: Andy is an even worse layabout than Snuffy. Stuffy at least steals and fishes. Andy cadges drinks and bets his wife’s earnings on the horses.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
As someone on the spectrum myself, I’m fairly confident that if the Evansii accurately wrote Phil as neurodivergent it is purely by accident.
@vince: They aren’t Scantron, but yes, usually there are answer sheets and No. 2 pencils provided.
I don’t follow Luann, so I’m afraid to ask what the K2 on Tiffany’s vest means. Some kind of shout-out to the Bizarro strip?
Luann: Nothing is more “junior high school” than thinking adult relationships involve talking like you’re aliens teaching an introductory course on consent. “I’m sorry, I kissed you without asking permission.” “That’s all right, I liked being kissed by you.” “Would it be acceptable if I kissed you again.” “Yes, but we should save intimate relations until after our union has been sanctioned by the law and the religion of our choosing.”
DENNIS THE MENACE: Oh I get it now. What Mr Wilson is saying is that Dennis still has “accidents” on the xarpet.
@astroboy: Tiffany works at Kafe Kablooie, or whatever TJ calls his restaurant at the Fuse. The logo is K2 for the restaurant’s initials.
Crankshaft: “One time in elementary school, my teacher had me put the encyclopedia books into alphabetical order …”
Eek!-He should have ordered a Virgin Bloody Mary.
CS: Cut to the chase! Get to the part where you shot your parents for naming you Batton.
@Joshua K.:
Thanks.
I had just read Bizarro, which has one of his trademark K2’s today (and an 02 cleverly hidden in the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign!) so I was wondering if the K2 Cult was spreading.
Girl Genius: Really nice episode today with excellent art, funny dialogue, over-the-top reaction shots, ridiculously dangerous zap stick things, Baker Street Irregulars, bone-crushing dragons, and snarky Tarvek.
I like to say something positive once in a while.
@Ukranazi Stepan: That was my thought too; the writing is too incompetent to have done this intentionally.
For example: today’s strip seems to be confusing “we’re not in junior high anymore, Tiffany, so you shouldn’t be shocked at the idea of two people kissing” with “we’re not in junior high anymore, Luann, so you should do your kissing in private.”
DtM: I’ve heard of housebreakers and I’ve heard of homewreckers (not remotely the same thing), but never have I seen them portmanteaued like this. Lewis Carroll is smiling down from heaven, for the first time ever at this strip.
@Joshua K.: “…and one volume just fell open to the entry about comic books! Gosh, what are the odds?”
Beetle Bailey: Are the writers of this comic so obtuse that they aren’t aware this expression now refers to sexual intimacy or are they fully aware and really want the readers to know that Beetle and Miss Buxley are doing it a lot, like all the time, just fucking like rabbits?
@Yesyouarejoshthedumb2ss: Sick burn, dude!
@Ukranazi Stepan: Andy Capp poops in a real toilet, not an outhouse. Hartlepool got modern plumbing sometime in the 1980s.
Crank: Batuik can NOT get over the fact that the Superman boys came from Cleveland. Everyone comes from someplace, Tom. Tadd Dameron came from Cleveland. Burgess Meredith came from Cleveland. Halle Berry came from Cleveland. Harlan Ellison, Philip Johnson, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins came from Cleveland. It’s a big town.
Luann: “We’re adults,” Phil says without any trace of irony whatsoever.
DtM: Margaret is definitely puzzled over Mr. Wilson assigning them gender roles.
Beetle Bailey-Beetle is frigid.
“Oh nuh, muh tonguh got stuk to tha clipbhord!”
“Mine tuh! Help uth, Thiffany!”
MW: Mary isn’t even trying to sound like Wilbur in these responses. Readers are going to be confused by the switch from drunken pabulum to trite pabulum.
FC: “Besides, I can’t even reach the doorknob.”
Dustin: I think we can safely blame Gen Z/Gen Alpha for all this mess.
CS: Hey, who are those three people in the background? I feel like I should know who they are.
9CL: Edda, It’s not like whatever audience you have isn’t going to realize you’re wearing “a zebra-stripe thong” when you do a mid-movement handstand on the piano.
@Bob Tice: #5
Bravissimo!!!!!!
@MKay: #7
re GT: I honestly cannot look at this strip without it hurting my eyes. Seriously.
GT:
“Go Comics, Laverne speaking.”
“Yes, this is Oliver Dewey of the law office of Dewey, Ketcham, and Howe. We’re representing Ms. Keri “Peanut” Thorp. She is filing suit on behalf of your depiction of her in panel 2 of today’s “Gil Thorp” comic. Ms. Thorp believes that the massive lips in panel 2 depict her as a fish rather than as a human being.”
“Well that’s her opinion but….”
“No buts, ma’am. Given the untimely death of Stellan the Goldfish in “Mary Worth,” Ms. Thorp has good reason to fear for her life and reputation. Consider Don Knotts’ career after “The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Oh no this cannot stand. She has been defamed enough already.”
“Mr. Dewey, artists have license….”
“Have you seen what the new artist has done to Beth the hot bartender? We are negotiating with her as well. This is “Apartment 3G” level of disrespect. And Marty Moon is a pathetic drunk now, is he? Balderdash! See you in court!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Every time I visit my dad, they’re watching a Benji movie.
This will not stand! Andy Capp is not some boffin who enjoys trivia games; when he goes to the pub, he plays darts.
@astroboy: #53
Good question…I would be especially suspicious if Tiffany was also carrying a tray of blueberry pie slices with a stick of dynamite on the side…
@however: “Boffin” is one of my absolute most favorite words. I wish we would adopt it in the US. So much more mellifluous than “egghead.”
Boffin.
Boffin boffin boffin.
RMMD: last week’s plot developments could lead to some pretty decent strips.
Augie (a.k.a. “The Teach”) could turn out to have grey-area criminal underworld connections, and have Stalky McGoatee “warned off”.
Summer could end up getting dominated by Augie (a.k.a. “Beercan”), and really, really, liking it.
But what’s probably going to happen? Augie’s up early, making breakfast and Nikki walks in, gets the wrong idea, tells June and Rex has a pissyface. I love the comics page!
@Ukulele Ike: My favorite UK English word is “dodgy.” It’s so much better than US words like “creepy” or “shady” or “scammy.”
Luann-“Oh just hurry up and blow him already.”
Luann-Luann should know about someone having a junior high mindset since she’s been having one for forty years.