Sunday is for bird crimes
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Shoe, 1/11/26
Did, uh, did you know that “naked running” means running without music? I myself did not, and I can’t find much evidence that this is a phrase particularly widely known by others; it’s the name of a company that makes belts for running, and sometimes it’s used more broadly to mean running without any kind of gadgets. But a little poking around to research this turned up this post in a UK running group on Facebook, and, uh, do you think the syndicated newspaper comic strip Shoe stole a joke from a UK running group on Facebook? Who’s to say. We should mostly focus our energy on praying that the brain trust over there never gets wind of “rawdogging.”
Mary Worth, 1/11/26
God damn it, Sunny! Ian was so close to the sweet relief of death! So close! You’ve thwarted him once again!
Pluggers, 1/11/26
Look, man, people often yell at me for being a coastal elitist because I make fun of the pluggers in Pluggers, but today’s strip is about how pluggers would rather eat fast food than exercise and they won’t even get out of their car to do it, and I didn’t write this joke. A faithful reader of the strip did, and he sent it into the syndicate, and then they drew it and put it in the newspaper! I’m not the mean one here!
Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/11/26
Good lord, they murdered that turkey. He was so happy to survive the carnage but then they murdered him and ate him! With big stupid grins on their faces!
95 replies to “Sunday is for bird crimes”
Mary Worth:
“He has to wake us up in the middle of the night to do it, too! — and just when I was having a great dream about experiencing Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’ !”
Mother Goose and Grimm-Between the fifth and sixth panel I would like to see that dog(?) pull out a comically large ax.
Blondie-Lou is just afraid that people are going to find out what happened to the missing health inspectors.
Slylock Fox-And that neighbor being Cassandra Cat.
MW-Today’s quote provided by a man who missed his plane flight because he was too drunk from the night before.
MW-And then the fire grows bigger because it was an electrical fire.
Mary Worth:
What’s so funny about his saving his, Ian’s and Toby’s lives, anyway?
MW: Of course, if it wasn’t for Sunny, the tree would have been taken down days ago. So there’s that.
Flylock Socks:
Cassie’s leaving a trail for the red jackal to follow to her boudoir where she’ll be waiting for him, all ready for a spot of ess ee ekstacy.
____________________________________
Wary Morth:
Ian’s cup holding grip is about as normal as everyone’s mobile phone holding grip in this comic.
Mary Worth:
“There are close calls that we’re not even aware of hundreds of times a year. Happy landings!”
— Federal Aviation Administration
Pluggers: Can’t really call it fast food when he just sits there idling unable to hear the voice on the speaker or the cars honking behind him.
Pluggers:
For pluggers, “You want fries with that, right?” is a rhetorical question.
MW: Back in December, I thought Sunny would heroically succumb to a carbon monoxide overdose, warning the oxygen-deprived brain trust to evacuate the premises. Meh, close enough.
Mother Goose and Grimm:
The poor gobbler would have been better served to have cobbled the Chick-Fil-A Cow’s existential cri de coeur, “EAT MORE CHIKIN.”
Shoe: I think we should refer to naked running as “streaking.” Because we’re 1970s pranksters who stripped off our leisure suits but kept on our first-generation Nikes and listened to Ray Stevens on our transistor radios as we ran across college quads and sports stadiums to protest whatever draconian rules the mean old deans had instituted to keep the youth revolution down, man. And that, my friends, is why we still can’t live within 100 yards of a school.
Mary Worth: A talking bird causes zany havoc in a household and nearly ruins a couple’s relationship, but then saves them when their house is about to burn down? Add in a nearly forgotten song from an old Broadway musical and, yep, I’d definitely believe Seth MacFarlane had something to do with this story.
Pluggers: Male pluggers have massive upper bodies, and they all played football in high school. They may not attempt any other exercises, but they definitely do pull-ups. (At least until the door frame they stuck the pull-up bar in can’t handle their weight anymore — and then it’s just vegging in the recliner from morning till night.)
Slylock Fox: “Slylock caught Slick Smitty climbing out of a neighbor’s kitchen window. What did Slylock discover missing from the house, and where did the stolen goods go?” What went missing from the house was the self-respect of the woman who lived there. Also a pair of earrings, which not-so-surprisingly ended up on the ears of another lady in the house across the street. Slylock never arrested anyone for any of this, but he did get material for another chapter in his book about the weird mating habits of human beings.
Shoe: But Shoe is always naked! He literally never wears clothes! How did he get even more naked? Did he pluck out his feathers? Because if a sick freak journalist was mutilating himself and running around in public, I’d call the police too.
Grimm: Actiually the turkey decided to celebrate Alexander Hamilton’s birthday with a little celebratory dueling.
MW: Ian puts out a smoldering electrical fire by pouring milk on it? Maybe Professor Ian and trophy wife Toby aren’t the mental mismatch we assume them to be.
Shoe: Interesting to open this strip with a panel of Shoe, who seems to be *everything* naked without repercussions, but maybe that just speaks to the inequality in avian society. I mean, if you were a rich and important media figure, how would you use your power? Would you maybe stroll around in the buff all day, going to restaurant and fern bars to hit on women with your junk exposed, just to show the world you can? No? Well maybe that’s why you’re not part of the global elite.
MW: You might be wondering why this strip is using a quote from Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane to talk about tragedies averted, but did you know that he almost died on 9/11? Put another way, did Sunny stop Charterstone’s own 9/11? Is he Santa Royale’s Mark Wahlberg? These are the questions I ask myself on a snowy Sunday morning.
Pluggers And after the pull-ups, Pluggers do a a few solid quats in the privacy of their own home.
Mary Worth Mashups: How about a trio of alternate final panels? Are any of them better than the original?
MW: If Sunny really had murder in his little heart, he would’ve snuck down and plugged the lights back in while Ian was pouring water onto electricity.
H&L: Is this Hi’s first hint that Thirsty is a lazy mooch? No sympathy.
MG&G: Why isn’t Mother Goose at the table? Oh, dear…
@Baja Gaijin: The first, definitely. Also could you do something with the tree in the “Gasp!” panel? I was imagining something more inferno-like.
MG&G — To paraphrase the Bible, we know not the holiday nor the hour. . .
MW — “Quickly, Ian, we have to unplug the tree and put out the smoking light.”
Obviously those tutorials on How to Stop Electrical Fires in the Home for Beginners that Toby’s been watching have paid off!
OTOH, who’s ever heard of a smoldering light bulb? And, if so, don’t the condos in Santa Royale have smoke detectors? And who leaves their Christmas tree lights on when the go to bed? This is the most pathetically manufactured crisis plot-point since the Morgan kids left the eggs out of the fridge.
Pluggers: in Animal Crossing: New Leaf (paraphrasing)
This one character “Doctor Shrunk” a comedian/psychiatrist was telling an anecdote in which he was talking to a person, who was saying “I’m fed up with this, I’m going to get out there and make a life for myself! Everyone will know my name!”
Shrunk: That’s all well and good, but I had to ask him… “Can I have fries with my order?”
MW: I know having the living room go up in smoke would be contrary to this strip’s devotion to tedium, but couldn’t the tree at least have been covered in flames? Now the only question is how many days of padding we’ll have before Sunny says “Love Ian” and triggers Mary’s victory lap.
@But What Do I Know?: (quietly unplugs my Christmas tree for the first time in two months…)
What’s even more baffling is Ian wanting to leave the tree up while also planning Sunny’s assassination by cat.
@Gerry Quinn: MW: Oh, they were trying to foreshadow this by having Ian ask to keep it up because it lifted his spirits while dealing with the bird mess – but with maniacal eyes leading to speculation that he was going to try to kill Sunny with it somehow.
@The Rambling Otter: I just flip the switch on the power strip. Every time no one’s home and before bed. I’d ask what’s wrong with Ian and Toby’s common sense, but they aren’t even *trying* to use the birdcage door.
@17 Ken: You want fire? You get fire.
MW: Close your robe, Ian. I shouldn’t have to spend my Sunday mornings imagining whether the pubes sticking out of the fly on your pajama bottoms are black or gray.
Damn you, “Mother Goose & Grimm” — you made me go on Wikipedia!
To celebrate Alexander Hamilton’s birthday, the turkey played the role of Hamilton while the cat(?) played the role of Aaron Burr.
Re Josh’s “rawdogging” comment– don’t be silly, that’s not a Shoe joke! They’d put that gag in Marvin where it belongs!
MW: If we lived in a kind, giving universe, next week would come the revelation that Sunny plugged the tree in himself. “Because SQUAWK you, that’s why!”
For a traditional Alexander Hamilton’s birthday dinner, you should challenge the turkey to a duel.
Shoe – Cosmo…did you know screwing the pooch was merely a figure of speech….
MW – Um…it’s the 11th of January. Is that candle still going in the pumpkin, too….
MG&G – Well…yeah, life is no fairytale….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: does Sunny get to be the guest of honor at a pool party?
JP: Like I said yesterday, these two make Luann and Bernice look like the wildest of party animals.
Luann: I don’t see you getting up to take the damn thing away and impose some consequences for rule-breaking, Mr. ‘I want to have kids of my own’!
RMMD: You ever get the feeling Beatty is smarting from not being given ‘Family Circus’ when Pater Keane passed?
@Baja Gaijin: Let’s take this a step further. Tree’s on fire and Sunny has the Supa Flaming Skeleton’s head. ‘POMPOUS AXX’S OWN ACTIONS HAVE MADE IT SO!!!’
Then Sunny flying away from massive explosion. HA HA HA!
RMMD: I really enjoyed today’s strip and artwork. No snark.
My first impulse was “but Shoe is already naked!”, but the caller isn’t Shoe, it’s “Biz.” Who’s Biz? According to the Shoe website, he’s the 96-year-old vulturelike guy who appears sometimes to complain about his hearing aids, and he does indeed wear a full set of clothes. So at least that part of it works, although given the exertion of running and Biz’s typical state of health, it would be more plausible for this phone call to be coming from the Treetops County Coroner.
Shoe – “I should have learned to do some research after I saw the cover of a William S. Burroughs novel without bothering to read it.”
6Chx: I have no idea what they pay Bianca Xinuse, but it’s far too much.
I know Mary Worth‘s writers like to grant their Sunday strips a little largesse by tacking on a quote from someone wise and famous. It’s weird and offputting to quote Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane alongside Emily Dickinson and Benjamin Disraeli, though.
It’s like they want us to mentally devalue great minds throughout history. Mary Worth, are you trying to undermine our faith in the wisdom of the past again? That’s AI’s job!
A (very mildly) funny Oglaf to start the test off:
https://media.oglaf.com/comic/truecrimefiction.jpg
Nothing great but with Oglaf’s present abysmal standards I’ll take what I can get.
@Ukranazi Stepan: *year off
@Baja Gaijin: Frankly it should have been at least that much of a fire, or, even better the whole tree burning.
Shoe: Stay in your lane, Shoe joke writers, and leave the coining of terms no one will ever use to Batiuk!
MW: I hope
IanSunny remembered to unplug the tree before Ian dumped toilet water on the defective bulb.Pluggers: He orders #10, which is indicated by the fast food place giving him the middle finger.
MGG: Hope makes the meat taste better. IF YOU’RE A PSYCHOPATH!!!
@Baja Gaijin: the first is the best, but Wilburman bursting in after the fire was over would be exquisite.
How is Mary going to take credit for the whole thing, I wonder?
BoT: Apparently toddler takes things literally, but I don’t get it. Anyone?
BF: I call foul. No mention of either getting up to make and pour coffee or ro “release” it
FC: “Or, like Daddy says, when no one else is using the useless f*^*&#@ things.”
Dustin: Ha ha! Dustin is the one they loathe the most!
Questionable Content:
The artwork on this strip has degenerated so much (along with the story telling) that when Sven turned up a few days ago most readers (at least insofar as https://www.reddit.com/r/questionablecontent/ is representative of readers) imagined that he was Clinton. Because, apart from a tiny man bun and greater height, Sven and Clinton now look exactly the same.
Thank you, Mother Goose and Grimm, for the reminder of how horrifying a world would be where all animals are fully sentient, intelligent, verbal, and aware of their mortality, from the apex predators who walk free to the domesticated turkeys who spend their truncated lives imprisoned for the crime of being delicious.
***
I don’t get it. Shoe walks around naked all the time. He’s naked in the damned title panel, for crying out loud. Why is this other bird getting arrested for being naked? Make this joke make sense in your bird people comic, damn it!
Shoe – As the title character of this strip routinely demonstrates, nudity is perfectly OK in the Shoe world. It’s the running that’s illegal. Engaging in healthful exercise would completely throw off the character designs.
@39 Ukranazi Stepan: That’s a good one! Slylock Fox isn’t nearly as clever. Or murderous.
@Tabby Lavalamp:
@Peanut Gallery:
It isn’t Shoe so got arrested, it’s Biz.
MW – “Quickly, Ian… We have to put out the Smoking Light and return our seats and tray tables to their locked and upright position!” “Exactly how long ago was it that you were a stewardess?”
Don Abundio, translated:
[Sign: BUS STOP]
“I wonder if you can tell me what you get when you cross an old goat with a low-down snake”
“A mohair boa?”
“No. You get Don Abundio”
Luann: I hate to say it, but I welcome this break from the Luann/Phil “relationship drama.”
CS: Inexplicably, Crankshaft will be driving the school bus, and a collision course to wackiness will ensue!
This is the least realistic Mary Worth I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s really saying something. Not the whole strained setup, or Ian’s awkward mug-handling that appears to have escaped Euclidean geometry — what dad ever gets up with the trophy wife to tend to a squawking kid in the middle of the night?!
MW: I’m going to gently suggest that narrowly avoiding being one of the thousands killed in the most horrific terrorist attack in living memory is not quite on the same level as being alerted to an incipient Christmas tree fire maybe two minutes before it triggers your smoke alarm.
Pluggers don’t bother to exercise, because why would they want to prolong their miserable existence?
@Baja Gaijin: They’re all better!
@Baja Gaijin: Too bad Ian remembered to unplug the tree before pouring his cup of milk (White Russian?) into the broken light.
@Baja Gaijin: Fire good.
Pluggers don’t exercise: they use immobile apps! Boom, that’s already better than the current punch line, work with it! (Also works with “Pluggers don’t do pull-ups, they use pull-ups,” zing!)
@Weaselboy: COTW Nominee
Mary Worth: I feel like this is going to turn into some weird abusive relationship where Sunny torments Ian nonstop but than periodically does something useful or nice as a form of lovebombing to lull him back into line. Before long, Ian’ll be on the Steve Wilkos Show with a black eye trying to argue that Sunny can change, he can fix him.
Pluggers: At this point, I’m seriously questioning the classification of Pluggers as a unique kind of person. I mean, seriously, “you’re a Plugger if you like fastfood”? What’s next, “you’re a Plugger if you like watching TV”? “You’re a Plugger if you like walks in the park”? Come on.
I’m trying to think of an appropriate “Pluggers” joke matching the strip to last night’s playoff game.
MW – “How come that parrot has only one leg?”
“Well, you wouldn’t eat a bird like that all at once, would you?”
Shoe
Finally a Shoe I can relate to. I saw an ad looking for a day spa worker to give facials. I showed up early and got the job. I was fired after the first customer.
‘Mythbusters’ did a show on burning Xmas trees because back in the old days, there were fires set by overheated lights.
Using more modern lights, the only way they could do it was by sticking the tree in a kiln to get it to a nice toasty brown and then putting an old string of lights on it.
Mary Worth
Oh, ho !
Sunny’s New Year’s dreams to remove Ian has taken a fortuitous turn!
Ian’s grandiose know-it-all narcissistic tendencies have proven the perfect storm of self inflicted doom as his ego soothing antics have taken a dangerous turn with a smoldering electrical short.
Sunny saved Tobey and Ian only for Ian’s ego to go and off himself by pouring water on a shorting electrical wire.
It truly is the dawning of a Happy New Year for Sunny and Tobey! ???
DT: Dang it, Endless, you wasted a perfectly good personally engraved compact on that? Couldn’t you have just slipped him a note?
Dustin: Okay, I’ll say it: it’s ridiculous to judge animals based on human ethics, especially Puritan-derived notions of labor as the only valuable use of time, because wild animals do only what they need to in order to a) survive and b) perpetuate their species, and the pygmy blue-tongued lizard is probably more successful at what it’s doing than the creators of Dustin are at creating witty insights on the generation gap.
JP: Huh, and I didn’t think Sophie had any soul left to lose.
MT: Mark failed to answer the second part of his question. (For the record: because they’re basically giant guinea pigs with an aura of supreme chill that is enviable in a world that seems to be collapsing at an exponential rate, and the ones in Japanese zoo have their own onsens which means they spend large portions of the winter submerged to their chins in hot water and honestly, I can’t blame them.)
RMMD: Look, I know “Sarah Morgan, Super-Genius Wonder Child” was effectively wiped out when she got hit by a bus or whatever, and I think I speak for all of us when I say good riddance, but are we sure the accident didn’t take her too far in the other direction? Because I’m pretty sure this isn’t how thirteen-and-a-half-year-olds write in their diaries.
S4th: Typo alert in panel #1 (not including the title banner)! Okay, not exactly a typo, but “the” should be replaced by “this”.
MW: Well, who the heck leaves the Christmas tree lights plugged in all night, anyhow? Maybe tomorrow, you two can leave the dryer running when you’re both out.
@Buck Ripsnort: Nah, the “rawdogging” joke will go in Mother Goose and Grimm, once the turkeys get their revenge.
@pugfuggly: I did know that! Because I read that in the context of the interview where that quote appears, while verifying it. But… Toby and Ian know very well about this alleged close call? Maybe it would have worked better if Sunny, the brains of the operation, had solved a problem in the night without waking them?
Mother Goose and Grimm:
You usually have to think about the strip for a second or two before you realize that what BLONDIE elicits with its bits about Dagwood’s eating habits is not humor, but horror, taking our disgust at his relationship with food and building on it until we wonder if the very act of eating is irredeemably loathsome. Leave it to Mother Goose and Grimm to make that horror explicit, and to tag it with a holiday only Dagwood would celebrate.
The two great Pluggers themes are “Pluggers are fat” and “Pluggers are old,” and this caption works for either one, since Pull-Ups are a brand of diaper.
@Ukranazi Stepan: MW: the way Ian’s holding that cup defies Euclidean geometry.
MW: Once I was living in Tennessee in a rental that was in such bad condition we had to call out the housing inspector to document all the violations that the landlord refused to fix. (The inspector got out of her car and immediately said, “Oh, I remember this house,” then told us how many times she’d been called to the same house by previous tenants.) When we pointed out the lack of a smoke detector, she informed us, to our surprise, that smoke detectors were not required in that jurisdiction. Should we have, therefore, bought an expensive parrot and let it fly freely around the house, in hopes that it would warn us in case the place was about to burn down one night? I guess that was an option. Alternatively, she informed us that the fire department distributed smoke detectors for free.
Blondie:
FC – And you can’t park in any of the other spots if you’re driving a car made after 1965. Sometimes the collision between recycled art and updated gags gets pretty weird.
FC: Not sure why Thel is taking the kids to a classic car show but I guess anything to get these monsters out of the house.
MW; Okay, maybe we oversold the dramatic potential a bit – but remember, it was a Close Call, and could have been a Major Fire. But nonetheless, Sunny DID save them, and I think the heartwarming denouement is just around the corner.
A lot of you have been asking about newcomer Vixen, and whether we’ll see her again. Maybe, or not. Her specialty is short-term plot device roles, but she really made a name for herself (“Vixen”) in those touching moments with Sunny! I think her un-named owner was also a temp day-jobber.
MG&G: An unexpected post-season gig for Thompson, one of our talented Turkey thespians! A great display of exuberance, with a “twist” ending! Of course that’s a stage prop in the last panel – he’s okay …. Hey Intern, has Tom checked back in yet? … no?!? OMG! Drat, gotta go in on Sunday and deal with the paperwork…
@The Quiet Man: Don’t forget. Brad’s idea of his family is essentially let his kids do whatever the crap they want while Toni is nothing else but a baby making factory. Remember when that guest artist took over the strip.
Mother Goose & Grimm: In their defense the turkey kept yelling at them to “Gobble, Gobble, Gobble!”
@CanuckDownSouth: My tree is just plugged into an extension cord which is plugged into the wall.
For an Alexander Hamilton dinner, would it be more fitting to serve Ham?
(And as I typed that, I suddenly remembered AGES ago, that there was a pig character in Mother Goose and Grimm, named Hamm, who was a friend of Mother Goose before he got Lyman’d out of the strip)
MW: Does “put out that smoking light!” Have anything to do with “light the smoking lamp?” People seem to say that a lot in internet comment sections in the late afternoon, say about twenty after four.
@taig: According to Beastars, it’s fear.
A lion mafia kidnapped Haru the rabbit so they could eat her (despite being both fully sentient) and the lion gave a whole spiel about fear making prey taste better.
Haru then blocked out all of their fear tactics by going to her happy place in her mind. This ticked off the mafia leader who then threatened “darker” means to scare her.
This show was “What if Kevin and Kell was actually good?” (but even then I stopped watching after Season 1, it was way too bleak)
Mary Worth Flaming Update: Per @33 The Quiet Man’s and @40 Ukranazi Stepan’s suggestions, MOAR FLAMES! I added this to the original Mashup link; scroll down to see it if you’ve already viewed the mashups.
@The Rambling Otter: The Stephen King novel, It, also endorsed the notion of fear as an enhancer.
@Baja Gaijin: YES!
YES!!!
Since Shoe lacks clothes all the time Biz’s crime must not have been running without them. So maybe the birds are only allowed to do “naked running” but he foolishly undressed and kept his Walkman or Zune or whatever. And I guess the bird authorities come down hard on that kind of distracted activity, which seems kind of dystopian to me but then I’m not an animal that loses millions to running into windows so what do I know.
@taig: You’re right! That completely slipped my mind ^^;
@Baja Gaijin: Superb, the final one where Sunny has evolved into his final form as a bringer of death.
Ian pouring a liquid on a shortening out electrical just made things worse!
DT: OK – it was a feature and not a flaw – he didn’t forget about the compact.
MW – Sunny is a hero and Ian continues to blunder along – pouring a liquid on a short circuiting electrical.
Phantom – lucky for the major, he runs into the one person who not only knows of the striped underwear one but also is well up on esoterica of the final days of WW2 in the ETO!
JP – oh girls just kiss and make out and get it over with.
RIP Bob Weir, the kid in the Dead.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Hey, come on. Sexy vampiress/doctor/nympho/cool-hat-wearer is now a John Dickson Carr cozy mystery-style amateur detective?
Oglaf is the best comic strip EVER.
Mary Worth
Awww yeah!
Ian and his pompousity does the work for all of us! ?
Our New Year’s dream are coming true!, ?
@Voshkod: As they say on Match Game, you’ve come up with “the definitive answer”!
Crank: I’d have a better idea how I’m supposed to feel about the SLEDGEHAMMER FORESHADOWING that this guy is going to be in a car accident if I knew who he was. I mean, he’s a Crankshaft character, so obviously I don’t care if he’s in a car accident, but do I just not care, or should I be actively rooting for it?
(Wait, is he Keesterman? Is this what Keesterman looks like when he’s not scowling? I guess, on balance, that’s a “just don’t care”.)
EC: I don’t normally say this about a strip that took a whole week to make the same joke, but Foxtrot did it better.
JP: Reena being surprised and annoyed by the realities of a sub-Arctic winter isn’t just a rehash of Monday’s strip. This is actually the following day, and she’s surprised and annoyed all over again, just as she has been every single day since November! Join us again this summer to hear her ask why it’s so bright at 10pm over and over again!
Phantom: It has just occurred to DePaul that he never actually explained what the deal was with this Allied/Nazi/Allied plane in the first place. So it’s time for a massive infodump! Join us in 2027, when he might even get around to explaining how it travelled through time!
RMMD: I am so looking forward to the fourth-wall breaking story where Sarah finally learns why Terry Beatty’s signature keeps appearing in her diary.
S4th: Darn it, I was ready to be all “Actually, Ces, I think you’ll find you introduced Faye long after Hil was in pigtails” and it turns out that’s the gag? You win this round, Ces!
@Treetown: Yeah, but did Endless Mahoney pick Dick’s pocket and write the message inside the compact in lipstick under the very eyes of the two detectives? They have more on their hands with this babe than they think.
@Gladly the cross-eyed bear: Hey, I’m here because I’m not trying to think about it. Currently listening to him sing lead on “Cassidy” at the Madison Square Garden show, September 19, 1990.