Oh, it’s OK to punch a guy in the throat, but this goes too far somehow
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Hi and Lois, 4/7/26
You know, if, before today, you had asked me which Walker-Browne character would have been the first to declare themselves a sovereign citizen, I would’ve guessed Rocky from Beetle Bailey. I can’t say that it’s a huge surprise to see Thirsty winning this particular race, however.
Judge Parker, 4/7/26
OK, so, when I said that this thing was a maybe fraternity paddle yesterday, I was joking, because where would they get a fraternity paddle? But Randy as an ex frat boy suddenly makes a lot of sense, honestly. He went to Harvard Law but Harvard doesn’t have a Greek system, so where do we think he did undergrad? Duke? Feels like a Duke guy, right?
Gil Thorp, 4/7/26
FORESHADOWING! Which Mudlark golfer will lose an eye when a sudden gust blows a chip shot right back in their face? Who will be found liable when courtroom testimony about this very conversation results in multiple diverging interpretations, Rashomon-style? Stay tuned to Gil Thorp to find out!
56 replies to “Oh, it’s OK to punch a guy in the throat, but this goes too far somehow”
GT: School buses don’t have seat belts.
JP:
“Y-you’re me, with a different hairdo!”
MW: Is there a reason Mary isn’t giving the very pertinent scam information? Did she decide to punish Hart for storming out on her by doing only the bare minimum? Or does she get some sick delight out of being the only one with all the facts?
Is anybody else hearing the old Alfrd Hitchcock theme song looking at Thirsty in panel 2, today? Begin your evil scheme that ends in tragedy, Thirsty. Or, more likely, at the bar of an Applebee’s at 11:16 AM.
GT: Does Dorothy’s tongue always protrude from her mouth like that, or is she blowing bubble gum, or WHAT?
@Lauralot: Actually most do these days.
@Charterstoned: That’s her lower lip. Her upper lip is dark because it’s in shadow. Below her lower lip is its shadow.
What the Hell is going on with the wheels of that school bus? Does it only have four seats? Or does it have a double set in back like Hitler’s car? Or a set in the middle of the bus, like no competent artist this side of Dr. Seuss would draw, ever? It’s that one, right?
GT: “A little wind won’t hurt anyone, heh heh.”
Coach Thorp is seriously injured when he backs into the rapidly spinning windmill on hole three of the mini-golf.
“AAAAH! Hoist by my own petard!” He cries.
Oh, I saw Ann P. hitting Santa Claus
Underneath the bristled woe last night
He didn’t see her creep —
Frowns and stares – to have a peep
He thought that she was mucked up in her bedroom, gassed but cheap
Then I saw Ann P. pickle Santa Claus
Underneath his beard, so showy white
Oh, what a gasp it would have been
If Randy had only seen
Ann P. hitting Santa Claus last night.
GT: “Seatbelts! I love their theme song for Cowboy Bebop, Tank! Everyone join in!
I think it’s time we blow this scene
Get everybody and their stuff together
Okay, 3 2 1 Let’s jam”
MW: Hey, didn’t Mary have a SON in the before time? Slim…? And a grandson named Dennie? Maybe she could spend her time trying to find and RECONNECT with THOSE guys and leave Harv and Sharon the hell alone.
@Powers: And still I can’t unsee it.
JP:
“Of course, Bogdan here is up a creek without a paddle — so to speak.”
Gil Thorp:
“With lips like those, Dorothy, you should be on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills!”
Dustin : “You see, the way it was explained to me, I’m only supposed to lie or say nothing to THE POLICE. I can tell YOU what REALLY happened, because it’s YOUR job to LIE me out of this situation.”
**************
Heathcliff : “Nah, I ain’t feuding with him.”
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Hi & Lois : is written by people who DON’T know that people CAN incorporate themselves for tax purposes.
…Which is weird, because I thought being a cartoonist is the EXACT kind of freelance, self-employed job where you can write off EVERYTHING as a business expense, so incorporating yourself would be the first thing you do.
**************
Judge Parker : Alternate dialogue “WHAT DID YOU DO!?” “Come on, Neddy, you punched him in the throat and he was suffocating to death. This was a mercy kill. Also, I just made sure that now, the autopsy will pin his murder on me, you’re welcome.”
**************
Luann : Look at Piro’s siblings in the first panel. Look at how they’ve ALWAYS been portrayed as well-behaved kids who quietly sit down reading instead of using screens, or worse, wreak havoc all across the place like horrible hellions.
And then remember that Piro ran away from home because he didn’t want the hassle of being in charge of these perfect angels that take care of themselves anyway.
…The Evansii have made Piro into someone who’s worse than Toni’s brother Jonah, and I’m not sure they realise they’ve done this?
************
Safe Havens : It turns out that Alex, who told us he is an orphan with amnesia who doesn’t remember ever being a kid, was ALWAYS a Saint-Bernard dog that had somehow assumed human shape. That retroactively makes it okay that the main characters IMMEDIATELY took him into their confidence and revealed all their DNA shapeshifting secrets to him!
GIL THORP: “And even if a gust does blow a chip shot back in our faces and causes the team to lose an eye, with our art style, who could even tell the difference anyway?”
H&L: Let’s see…the Citizens United decision was in, what, 2010? Guess that’s a relatively contemporary reference for Hi & Lois.
JP:
“What did you do?!”
“I asked him politely to pose for my re-rendering of ‘Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,’ and he demurred — so I had to take matters into my own hands!”
Gil Thorp:
So…is Ms Wolfe’s name actually Dorothy, or was Gil making a Wizard of Oz joke?
JP – Slowly, Bogdan struggles to his feet. “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another one, ma’am!?”
GT: SEAT BELTS EVERYONE!
*Please* let this be a normal comic strip!
With the Thorp? NO WAY!!
GROAN!!!
Judge Parker: Randy went to Ole Miss, and you know it. We all know it, in our hearts.
Gil Thorp: When Dorothy chooses to leave rather than take part in an unsafe sporting competition, will we have a Dippin’ Dot, as the kids most assuredly do not say?
@Charterstoned: According to Wikipedia, they’ve been MIA since the Carter administration or thereabouts. She could conceivably have great-great grandchildren she doesn’t know about. Now there’s a storyline that’d get people picking up the paper!
HI AND LOIS: Everybody run! Hi and Lois is trying to make relevant social commentary! Mayday, mayday! Code red! Our only saving grace is that they’re not all that good at it yet (so…like any Twitter denizen then).
Pickles – Isn’t Nelson a little young to be asked by his grandpa if he jerks off?
@Bob Tice: Dagwood hears Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,’ and thinks that lunch is on at his neighbor’s.
@Comically Challenged: It would at least hold Jeff’s interest over dinner at the Bum Boat.
Hi and Lois: Hi is torn: does he suggest that his best friend/coworker create a Limited Liability Corporation, or does he explain that mixing alcoholism, sloth and money owed to the federal government can result in hefty fines and a lengthy prison stay? It’s that one, right?
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: [With apologies to Bob Tice]
H&L — Sure, Thirsty, tell everyone about how you’re going to write off your alcohol consumption as “research.”
“Hi & Lois” decided to mine that endless source of laughter: the transitive property
Is “Dorothy” Ms Wolfe’s first name or is Gil making a joke about tornados and the Wizard of Oz? I can’t tell whether it is a joke because it’s not funny anyway
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
Judge Parker: Randy went to Ole Miss, and you know it. We all know it, in our hearts.
That would track. So, then, probably an SAE or KA. Maybe Phi Delt.
I may have been involved in SEC Greek Life as a young person. We still made paddles for our big sisters at that point. Now, in a kinder, gentler era, I think the girls, at any rate, decorate some sort of wooden version of a symbol – squirrel, anchor, dove… what have you.
I can’t imagine that at the KA house, though.
@Comrade Gordon: That’s what I thought, too. And will a wind reference from Dorothy bring us to a twister in the ensuing days?
Dorothy reference (1939 movie), Let’s Boogie (Chuck Berry 1972 song). Gil is slowly crawling towards more recent references. Tomorrow: a millenium bug joke
MW Everyone’s putting down Mary for being oblique, nobody’s considering how difficult it is for her to maintain a conversational train of thought while (ugh!) having to touch a _smartphone_ with the tiniest possible bit of her skin in a pinch grip, because a lady doesn’t use _speaker_ mode!
JP What did she do? Well, brain damage on top of the throat injury if we were being *realistic* about loss-of-consciousness blows to the head…
Phantom And now the Unknown Commander communicates telepathically with Worubu in Panel2… or the artist couldn’t be bothered to get the thought-bubble tails drawn properly.
BF: I’m pretty sure we’ve moved on to reprints for the daily strip and by golly, they’re worse than the new ones we were getting a few weeks ago. Saturday’s big reveal — Joey is a kangaroo.
6Chx: Oh, hi, Bianca, got a joke for us today? No? Bye, Bianca.
Phantom: Mansplaining.
DT: For a bunch of goons, these three are not complete saps. They can tell this is a set up with them as a fall guys.
GT: PLEASE get a guest artist back! The sagging melting faces like molten wax, and these vehicles that defy basic geometry!
JP: Down goes Bogdan! Down goes Bogdan! In his mind, his manager is screaming at him, Get up Bogdan! Get up, Get up, you bum! … and when Neddy and Anne realize that Bogdan has gone for the Big Sleep, they have to find a place to inter the body.
MW: Has Mary dropped the $200k bombshell?
RMMD: OK – lazy story telling now will have this mustachoied guy see a story on TV mentioning Lorna Starr or a movie is on with her as the star.
Hi & Lois: I’ve never noticed it before, but Thirsty looks like a disheveled, hard-boiled detective when he’s in his work clothes! Or, in silhouette, a cartoon bear. Ooh! And if I imagine both things are true, the strip gets better!
@treetown: re: RMMD: He’s a wholesale vendor of Lorna Starr memorabilia and autographed photos. When he figures out who the waitress is he is going to feel SO stupid.
Hi isn’t an accountant, but that look on his face is one of someone who doesn’t want to tell Thirsty he doesn’t make nearly enough money to not pay taxes, even if he was a corporation.
***
Someone is lying on the ground with severe brain trauma? Sounds like a fraternity hazing to me.
Gil Thorp: Ah, Milford! Where you can tell women are women from their long hair and bee-stung lips! The bees are expensive, but evidently everyone thinks they’re worth it.
GT – Gil is telling someone named Dorothy that a little wind won’t hurt anyone? He’s obviously not familiar with The Wizard of Oz.
Josh notices the same thing in Hi & Lois that I noticed in Dilbert – a shallow pretense of class consciousness that, at its core, is libertarian self-centeredness. A desire to stick it to The Man? No, a desire to simply take The Man’s place instead.
Josh notices the same thing in Hi & Lois that I noticed in Dilbert – a shallow pretense of class consciousness that, at its core, is libertarian self-centeredness. A desire to stick it to The Man? No, a desire to simply take The Man’s place instead.
JP: Police standing over a body they just pulled out of a dumpster.
“Looks like the fraternity paddle killer has struck again.”
LUANN: Boy Piro sure caught a lucky break. Bernice is so enraptured in her own sexual fantasies (this is what people in the Luann-verse think “sex” looks like) that Piro doesn’t even have to bother making up an excuse for why he can’t pick up the little wiener. (“Sorry Bernice, I can’t take Alan home on account of the fact that I’m too busy not wanting to spend any time with him. Thanks for understanding, doll!” Meanwhile, Bernice heard nothing but the “doll” part and is now experiencing what she thinks his her first orgasm.)
LUANN (2): Also, note that Piro isn’t calling Tara, his cousin, for this favor. Maybe he knows she already has so many important things to do today (“Sorry, cuz, but Les is claiming to be an expert scuba diver so I have to spend the whole afternoon watching him drown”
MW-“Oh and also this online girlfriend scammed your father of $200,000.”
FC-Dolly, go outside catch and pluck a bird.
RMMD-This is Fred Garvin Male Prostitute.
Dolly is no Ernie Anastos: Ernie Anastos & Keep Fucking That Chicken Viral Video
But maybe Jeffy is.
JP – “He went to Harvard Law but Harvard doesn’t have a Greek system…”
Even if it did, law school students don’t usually join the kind of frats with wooden paddles (and keggers and hazing). They might join a professional fraternity like Phi Alpha Delta, though.
Today we learned that the bus drivers in the Gil Thorpiverse have a very bad union, as the driver today has all the signifiers of the living dead – blank white eyes, post-mortem bloating, an apparent broken neck, and the ability to moan only a single word – ‘seatbelts!’ Rise up, living bus drivers, before the cost-effectiveness of using zombies becomes all too apparent. That said, if they want to replace Crankshaft with a corpse, I’m OK with that, and I’m pretty sure no one will notice. Hell, the smell might improve.
GT: Everyone in this strip could take a golf ball to the lower lip and no one would be the wiser.
MW: What’s with the ambiguity? Is Mary afraid that there actually MIGHT be a Trixie, who could sue her for slander?
H&L: Learning the sovereign citizen handbook seems beyond Thirsty’s attention span. He could just declare himself a church.
H&L: I am going to be disturbed all day by the second panel’s revelation that Thirsty’s nose is a spherical lump that’s barely attached to his face. I don’t know if he has a “good side”, but this view sure ain’t it.
FC: Dolly wants to get it right when she gives Jeffy the finger at dinner time.