Various sadnesses
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Shoe, 2/11/26
Shoe is a comic strip about depressed bird-people that is pretty committed to the gag-a-day format, but it’s actually been doing a continuing story of sorts for the past week or so. The story is about how the Perfesser bought a beautiful classic car that has turned out to be impractical and unsuitable for everyday use, giving him a specific reason to be depressed beyond the strip’s general sense of ennui.
Crock, 2/11/26
Wow, I bet you assumed Crock’s Legionnaires were involved in a rapacious colonial war to build up the glory and wealth of France, but apparently they will sometimes impose harsh punishments on French industrialists who aim to exploit the colonized population in ways that violate the laws of the Métropole! It really makes you think (about how child labor isn’t really a suitable subject for jokes, and execution by firing squad probably isn’t either).
Mary Worth, 2/11/26
JESUS CHRIST JEFF SHUT UP DO NOT ASK HER ABOUT THIS SHE WILL RECOUNT THE WHOLE STORYLINE AT YOU AND WE JUST NOW GOT OUT OF IT I’M BEGGING YOU
53 replies to “Various sadnesses”
Mary Worth:
“Look at the birds, Jeff! They remind me of Toby and Ian:
— they’re ‘flighty’;
— they’re messy;
— they’re constantly chattering; and
— they’re possessed of ‘birdbrains’ !”
It looks like Mary Worth has settled into the Parrot Groove and has no intention of moving. It’s all callbacks to the Parrot Storyline now until the heat death of the universe, with increasingly tenuous segues. A strip circa 2039: “You know, Wilbur, the way you entered through the doorway just now reminds me of the time a parrot flew into Toby’s room…”
Mary Worth:
“Never mind that the awe-inspiring sunset was the point of my taking you out on this boat to begin with, Mary. Let’s spend our time talking about parrots instead of gazing at nature’s magnificent handiwork!”
Crock: Are child sweatshops known for providing their exploited workers with recess? Can’t help feeling this detail gets in the way of the “joke”, such as there is one.
MW: Seagulls are loud, annoying, stupid, vicious, greedy, and shit on everything in sight… I see where Mary’s coming from.
Shoe:
“What model of old car is this, anyway, Uncle Shoe?”
“The Cormorantvair. Unsafe at any speed!”
MW: Jeff smiles but in his mind’s eye he’s replaying the concierge scene from The Producers:
“Boids…Dirty, disgusting boids!”
“Urk” definitely feels like the sound a distressed bird would make, particularly one whose classic car broke down.
Crock:
“Bring them here and prove it!”
“How in the world can I do that when you have me tied to a tree?!? — what a Crock!”
Mary Worth:
“Look at the birds, Jeff! I’m inspired to wax rhapsodic about these gulls: ‘To everything/Tern, tern, tern‘ !”
“What prompted them to adopt parrots?” asks the man who owns a boat the size of a cruise liner.
JP: Ah, so this is a prison run by Pavel’s mob. They certainly have a lot of enemies if they need a whole prison. And what, pray tell, did Randy try to ‘take’? CIApril herself, I’m guessing? Note also that being in the gulag has done nothing to temper that old Spencer-Parker-Driver ‘I don’t need anyone!’ attitude. Buckle up everyone, this is gonna be good. And by good, I mean excruciating.
S4th: Good grief, Bettina, what the hell did you put in that snowball?
Luann: So it was this hideous woman in the shadows on Monday? Those masters of misdirection have struck again!
FC: After PJ demands a food taster, Thel gets in his face.
“How many times do I have to tell you Dead Grandpa wasn’t poisoned!”
MW: Looks like Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars! got that extension on his parrot contract after all—and scored some bonus appearances by his avian extras, as well! I heard those very birds were supposed to be in a Super Bowl commercial for some precision stunt work, but they picked Bill Shat instead. Maybe we’ll get to see their performance as they fly over Mary and Jeff!
MW: “And the ocean… it reminds me of when Wilbur had not one but two maritime accidents.”
“Like this?”
::Jeff shoves Mary overboard and guns the engine::
Luann:
Oxen tend to be vulnerable to attack by crocodiles, and that person is a close approximation of one.
_______________________________
Suburban Fairy Tales:
Hugging is right out. But kissing and tearing off each other’s clothes to have sex right there in front of pigmum? Bring it on!
_______________________________
Wrecks Moregone:
I don’t know; isn’t getting 20 years older in the course of a surgery something to brag about?
_______________________________
Pudgy Jerker:
Randolph, speaking in stereotypical Slavic accent makes me feel stupid, but what your excuse for really being stupid in real life?
Crock: Why are they reading him what he’s accused of when he’s already tied to a post, about to be executed? Assembly-line justice, Crock-style. You taking notes, Dick Tracy?
Shoe: He’ll have fun, fun, fun ’til MacNelly takes his T-bird away.
Crock: The year was 1993. North Americans were growing increasingly aware that their lavish lifestyles were coming at the expense of children working in sweatshops overseas. But rather than take action, many of us tried to use humour to diffuse our guilty consciences. Then, five years later, CROCK jumped on the bandwagon.
Ah yes, birds, they must be such a rare sight in a coastal California town– are you kidding me, Mary? So from now on, the sight of any bird at any time is going to remind you of those knuckleheads? “Look, a cat! It reminds me of Estelle… and her cat!” “Hey, it’s a bald guy! Makes me think of that fish…that lives with Wilbur!” We’d better hope Dawn never gets it in her head to foster, like, a baby squirrel, or we might have to confine Mary indoors for awhile.
Wake up from their nap would have been funnier and less disturbing
DT: Oh, snap! Who’s disfigured now, Dick? Who’s on a phrenologically predestined path to deviance, villainy and perdition now, lawman?
GT: “How do you separate church and state? How to do you calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle? What is the only great ape not native to Africa? What is the devil’s interval and why is it so called? What does Silas Marner say about the intersection of wealth and happiness? Speak up, Thorp! The sports program is thriving because we threw our whole budget at it, so you gotta fill in for all the teachers we had to fire to make up the difference!”
@Unchecked capitalism: No, it really wouldn’t.
MW – Josh, reading my mind is not fair. This was my precise reaction to Mary Worth today, down to the ALL CAPS pleading.
Crock: Poor, dumb Schmeese. If he really wanted to avoid accountability, he shouldn’t have gotten involved in child labor — he should have gotten involved with a bazillionaire international child sex trafficker.
MW No, the one constant is that you you won’t stop going on and on about the %^^$#ing PARROTS!
JP I guess Russian-mob-prison got the factory-seconds for hats because when Randy folds down the earflaps that he has pinned up, they won’t go to his chin like the ones on overly-gregarious-prisoner, but instead flop all over his shoulders
BF I don’t follow this one much so I didn’t see Blonde Friend go through a bunch of bad jobs, but maybe just maybe before buying into the new company she should seek out the lady who quit due to a “better job offer” and get a clue about whether or not she was leaving a sinking ship
Mary Worth: Please let there be such a thing as bird strikes for yachts, please let there be such a thing as bird strikes for yachts, please…
So now Luann’s into older women? Sure, why not? Anything that shakes up her boring, do-nothing life is probably a net positive. Note that she’s been making that goo-goo eyes face for three days now, and at two or three different people.
Pluggers have early onset dementia.
CS: Forget the alleged punchline; just look at that child’s face. They look they’re watching a beloved pet die. It really drives home how pointlessly cruel this is. Then again, if they have to grow up in the Funkyverse, preparing them for pointless cruelty would be a valid point.
Shoe: Hasn’t the Perfesser always driven a vintage DeSoto? Wasn’t it pink?
MW: Look at the birds, Jeff. They remind me of Toby and Ian…. and uh, their parrots. It’s not because they’re birdbrains or something.
Shoe: See, you don’t need any fancy ‘punchline’ for your jokes. Sometimes the misery of your despicable characters is enough to inspire a heaty chuckle!
MW: Put that thought on pause, Mary: I really want to hear what Dr Jeff thinks a ‘typical bird owner’ is, because I get the sense that it is *not* complimentary.
“So, I know this may not be the most important thing right now – as I face the firing squad – but why am I tied to a giant cucumber?”
“Well, Crock wanted everyone to know you’re in a real pickle.”
Laughter
“OK, fire!”
MW: Come on, people, you can’t say we didn’t expect this. The strip has its
rutformat, ten or so weeks of “story” and then a couple weeks of Mary re-telling it to Jeff accompanied by puerile platitudes. It’s going to follow it to the extremely bitter end.I’ve never seen any of Shoe‘s characters on the ground before! Their entire world is in the treetops, and the strip used to include gags about them flying from location to location, how Loon couldn’t land safely, etc. Whether the car runs or not is almost irrelevant.
Except this story forces The Perfessor and Skyler to the ground, where the predators dwell.
Hmm. Carry on.
MW-“Consider the lilies, Jeff.”
MW-The seagulls who eat garbage from parking lots remind you of Ian and Toby? Yeah I can see that.
FC-Meanwhile Grandma is silently criticizing Thel instead of doing it openly.
Damn it, now I’m going to be spending the day wondering how attached garages work in these miserable bird people’s world.
***
Huh. Maybe Jeff’s a pretty savvy doctor after all, getting all the information he can on his future chlamydiosis* patients.
*Or whatever disease those bird brains are going to get as the result of their free-roaming parrots.
***
Tying a man to a pole then demanding he bring forth witnesses is… Yeah. I guess it’s what to expect from a colonial justice system that takes a man named “Schmeese” and dresses him up like he’s stereotypically French.
Are we really really sure that Mary is human? Maybe she’s a Replicant. Instead of birds, Jeff should ask her about upended tortoises in the desert. Why aren’t you helping, Mary?
SHOE: This is certainly not a comic strip about consistency or internal logic (They’re birds who live in and commute through trees. Tress which suddenly became way too small for the Perfesser and Skylar to live in, much less support an entire neighborhood for the whole cast to reside. Is it like TARDIS now?)
In the 1990s — the time this reruns are from — there was a huge scandal about Nike exploiting labour in Vietnam. I have to concede that this strip is mildly accurate, since Vietnam was a French colony. It is not accurate in the sense that Vietnam does not have the Sahara desert, but baby steps
MW: Unfortunately this has been a set pattern for a while. The story resolves, Mary takes a victory lap with her victim du jour, and then she takes another victory lap with Jeff. Only then can the new story begin.
9CL: Ugh, gross, no.
MW: Jeff keeps gunning his boat into unsuspecting seagulls resting on the water.
“No!!!” Yells, Mary. “That’s the Ian one.Try again.”
It is not enough for Mary Worth’s flat characters to put up stupid morality plays, we need a couple of weeks of Mary spelling out the lesson we are supposed to learn. Even in Aesop’s fables “O mythos deloi oti” was a later addition!
“Toby and Ian and their Parrots” is the Mary Worth version of the “Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain” abomination
@Will:
I miss the Charterstone pool parties. We haven’t had a Charterstone pool party since, oh, before Saul’s original snarly dog died.
“People change. It’s the one constant”. Mary is like “Screw you Parmenides, Heraclitus is my new best friend!”
MW: Mary was just waiting for an opening to yammer on about Toby and Ian’s latest (for lack of a better term) drama. Unfortunately, Dr. Jeff refused to supply one–probably because he was droning on about saving lives or whatever inconsequential stuff was going on in his life–so she had to create it. “Look, birds! I like birds! Say, you know who else likes birds…?”
Shoe: I dunno, if something had caused the hood of my car to blow clean off and land several feet away I wouldn’t still be sitting in it with an expression of resigned misery, but hey, I’m not the perpetually depressed bird-man here.
JP: “Excuse me, Kris Kringle. It’s time for my daily audience with the warden and all the guards where I threaten them impotently and they laugh in my face.”
9CL: “The only way to solve this enigma properly is for me to fuck each of you while the other one watches. Flip a coin, or eeny meenie miney mo for firsties?”
@Ukranazi Stepan: Make Chartestone Pool Parties Great Again.
I was watching a French series set in WWI and they kept threatening a soldier with “le peloton;” eventually from context I understood that this meant “firing squad” (a concept which had not previously come up in my study of French) and I looked up the literal definition of “peloton,” which is indeed “squad.” A fun lesson in etymology! Does this make my experience of this Crock strip richer? I’m going to say yes.
MW- using the seagulls as inspiration to rehash the story is new. They always have boat near the sea lion colony whenever she needs to go over a Wilbur story.
Is Shoe in reruns too, or is this just the first time that the creator realized that sometimes middle-aged+ people buy impractical classic cars? Is there a more obvious metaphor for Shoe than people who buy impractical classic cars, or vice versa?
MARY WORTH: “The Camerons don’t strike me as typical bird owners. Don’t you have to care about another living being in order to do that? Ian and Toby always seemed like they were struggling with the effort to do that about each other.”
Incidentally, I find Jeff’s passive-aggressive judgmental snottiness heartwarming. It means he does listen to Mary, after all. He’s become simpatico with her needs. They’re bonding, people! Tres romantique!
@Voshkod:
“I guess that would be an example of something corny, shown!”
C’shaft: Look, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that kids, especially the musically inclined, can and do listen to bands from earlier generations–Hell, the Divalings are both really into Metallica. But unless the choir is doing some kind of Bob Dylan medley for their concert, I’m calling “no way” on this one.
DT: Jerry is somehow simultaneously hilariously incompetent and brilliantly good at what he does. He’s kind of like the Captain Jack Sparrow of hitmen.
Dustin: “Mostly I just spout random celebrity names. Nine times out of ten he goes along with it.”
GT: Please, you think Gil Thorp needs to compartmentalize? Everything in Milford revolves around him; he doesn’t need to make any adjustments!
HotC: The Choco-Sun is fine, but whatever you do, do NOT give her the Choco-Ten of Swords.
JP: “And by the way, why are you suddenly talking in broken English? You were doing fine a little while ago?”
Pluggers never learn, even on the most basic level.
@mskyle: Would have been more interesting if they were punishing deserters by forcing them to use ridiculously overpriced workout equipment.