Being cool is not a sin, Dennis
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Pardon My Planet, 11/15/25
Truly, this is a dark vision of an alternate timeline where the British won the American War of Independence and brought Patrick Henry and the other revolutionary leaders back to England to be publicly executed for treason. Pretty grim stuff from a strip that has, up to this point, had as its main thesis the proposition that “women be shopping.”
Dennis the Menace, 11/15/25
I love how everyone is just kind of scratching their chins in a quizzical way here. Is there any particular reason he’s telling this to a clergyman? Does that make it more, or possibly less, menacing? Nobody is sure, exactly.
Mary Worth, 11/15/25
Earlier this week, I made a joke implying a budding sexual relationship between Toby and a parrot. This was immature of me and I apologize. In fact, what’s happening is that the parrot is becoming Toby’s first ever real friend, which is infinitely sadder.
31 replies to “Being cool is not a sin, Dennis”
Mary Worth Mashups: Do any of these missing final panels spice up this bee grinding?
Rex Morgan Mashup: I’m pretty sure this is the logical missing final panel. (scroll down to see it.)
MW:
“I’ve got To-bee me — I’ve got To-bee me! Sammy Davis, Jr. — awk, awk!”
MW-“What am I? Chopped liver,” an annoyed Mary asks.
RMMD-“What? No. I’m writing about a chess game.”
Dustin-Big deal about you winning a game. Anybody can beat Charlie Brown’s team.
Pardon My Planet:
I think that the strip author is confusing Patrick Henry, who said “Give me liberty or give me death” but wasn’t hanged, with Nathan Hale, who reputedly said, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” and was hanged.
@Baja Gaijin:
The second one.
DtM: You may have been cool, Henry, but you were never “Walt Duncan at ‘Burning Man'” cool.
PmP: “I’ll take Liberty, Alex.” Early game shows were a lot more violent.
DtM:
“Parson, are you going to give your next homily about the controversy involving a female horse and a lane lined with sturdy deciduous trees?”
“What kind of sermon would that be about, Dennis?”
“The great ‘Filly‘ ‘Oak Way‘ controversy!”
MW: There’s a mind-swap happening here. Soon, the bird will be speaking in full sentences, while Toby is reduced to, “Chirp” and the occasional “Squawk!” No one will really notice.
PMP: Refresh my historical knowledge; were hangmen typically shirtless, or only the buff ones? Did they put out calendars, like firefighters?
DtM: As a last-ditch effort to rid themselves of the demon in their midst, the Mitchells have added Saturday worship to their routine.
DtM: “In other words, Padre, compared to my Dad, you’re absolutely gassing it.”
@Bob Tice:
…Couldn’t the joke still be made to work, with something like “ACTUALLY, we *CAN* arrange for you to give TWO lives for your country, but you have to let US give the second one, so we can write it off as a donation”?
@MKay:
…I have no idea why medieval executioners are almost always depicted as being incredibly buff and shirtless. Is it that artists are unwittingly copying a “Oh ho, it’s actually the OTHER kind of dungeon where you get whipped” joke without realising THAT’s the source for the visual cliché?
BBailey Nope, they’re all dying from eating poisonous mushrooms – even those who realized foraged fungi are a risk figured it was better than facing another night of your cooking!
MW Forget Toby’s new friend, that parrot’s language development is so off-the-charts it should be under study by a world-class research team. Or it’s the harbinger of the Animal Uprising. Take your pick.
@CanuckDownSouth: There are real-life breeds of parrots “African Gray Parrots” in fact who are so ridiculously smart, they can practically literally hold conversations, as opposed to just repeating words.
MW: The few remaining pigeons that normally flit around Charterstone have all flown south or worse leaving Toby with the problem of how to prevent Ian from eating Sunny.
DtM: I imagine that for bringing Dennis into the world, the clergyman told Henry that he’s going to burn forever in hellfire.
Dennis: Mom says Dad used to be cool, but she’s probably just being nice.
“Still want to make fun of me for talking to my pets and slowly going insane when my loved one is away?” -Wilbur Weston
MW:
Thesis: the number of animals depicted as smiling/laughing/guffawing/grinning in this strip is approaching infinity as a limit. Discuss.
PmP: Why would the rope be the executee’s business? Surely it would be the hangman’s? No, nothing works about this at all.
DtM I’m particularly enjoying Henry’s expression here. “It’s true, I was never cool, but I think she was actually being sarcastic…”
MW: It’s interesting reading all these articles about ‘A.I. psychosis’, where people lose touch with reality after heavy interactions of LLM chatbots. Part of the problem seems to be that these models are trained to be deferential to the user, reinforcing their prior beliefs and giving them the validation that they crave from real-world interactions. Anyhow, completely unrelated, here is Toby becoming friends with a bird that just repeats back everything she says.
PMP – What if Patrick Henry refuses to sign? Are they just going to stand there and wait for some resolution that will never come? Those guys really didn’t think this through. And by “those guys” I mean Vic Lee.
RMMD Bets on just what level of cluelessness we’re about to get? Did Augie think “change her name and hair colour, but report every other detail” was actually changing the story enough that Summer wouldn’t see it as her own trauma on display, or did he actually have *some* minor different events, like the “Summer” discovering the body or even the stalker killed by someone other than a stranger? Either way, the setup is still basically making her relive it all and I’d say he *knew* this was wrong to pull on her without discussing it or he would have done so.
GT OK, so Not Oriented That Way, but help me out – is this not the least hot drawing of a lesbian lean-in-for-kiss move? Like, the XKCD girls could do it better with featureless stick figures, right?
@pugfuggly: re PmP let me give you some bad news about the bills relatives of the condemned in Iran and China get… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee
@CanuckDownSouth: @pugfuggly: Maybe the parrot is really a robot AI? Or a space alien — that would be in keeping with recent trends in Mary Worth.
MW:
Poor Sunny’s coprophagous grin
Will shortly give way to chagrin
When Ian gets back
He’ll go on attack —
It’s trouble that bird will be in!
MW- how the hell does Mary get involved in this story line? Parrot eats all her muffins? Tells Mary all of Toby’s secrets? Wilbur eats it and Mary has to console her? Get on with it.
DTM- it would be interesting to know what Alice thinks is “cool”
Facts are inconsequential in comics as well as comments.
DtM – Dennis really has no idea what is menacing and what is innocent. He just constantly parrots things his parents say in his presence with no clue as to the meaning of these sentences. The fact that he manages a “hit” once in a hundred times is what keeps him going. Today, that sweet reward still remains outside his grasp.
Doesn’t Toby have an iPhone? Why can’t she text a picture of Sunny to Ian while he’s at his multi-week teacher’s conference in the middle of the school year? That way Ian can say “now I’ve got two bird brains to deal with”.
MW: a parrot rearranges names five minutes afte before ng got ven a name? Sure, right. Denouement: will Toby answer Lost Parrot ad when she sees it?
LUANN: Siding with Dez here until I remembered how irresistible celery covered with pb covered with couch hair is.
ZITS: totally not fair. Dad (Curtis) gives Pierce an edge by straining his coffee through right sneaker.
To be a friend
That is the law.
Are we not men?
@Activist:
#28 corrected. MW:… five minutes after been ng given a name … Sorry, I hate this phone.
@Baja Gaijin: anything that makes Mary look like that has my absolute approval.