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Funky Winkerbean, 1/7/09

I have absolutely no idea why Becky the One-Armed Band Director looks so horrified in panel two when she thinks that Band Director Emeritus Harry Dinkle is about to launch into an impromptu lesson on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. If one of my high school band practices had been interrupted by an old man rambling away on the subject (“Let me tell you the most important thing my CO told me before we hit the beach at Normandy: For God’s sake, put a rubber on it! That’s how I managed to screw my way through every French cathouse in every town we liberated without my pecker falling off!”), it would have been the best band practice ever; certainly it would have been a more useful and relevant use of our time than attempting to master yet another Andrew Lloyd Weber medley. I can only assume that, as a Funky Winkerbean authority figure, Becky is required to supervise a certain amount of misery in her charges; she’s afraid that Harry is going to head off that chlamydia epidemic that’s raging nicely through the woodwinds, along with a couple of unplanned pregnancies that she’s counting on in percussion.

Judge Parker, 1/7/09

It appears that Heidi the sexy, trigger-happy cop is going to make a final attempt on Sam’s bemused, detached charms, possibly in one of Phoenix Sky Harbor’s parking garages. You know, I’ve finally figured out what Judge Parker’s ladies-love-Sam plots remind me of: the classic Billy Wilder film The Seven Year Itch, in which the protagonist, left alone in his sweltering Manhattan apartment as his wife and son head to the country on vacation, entertains all manner of sexual fantasies about his comely neighbor Marilyn Monroe and other women — almost all of which involve him coldly rejecting them as they fling themselves at him. I remember thinking when I saw it that it was unspeakably perverse, but Sam is so dull that he sucks all the thrill out of it.

Slylock Fox, 1/7/09

4) If you see a supposed surgeon advancing on you in full clown makeup, I don’t care how sick you are, get the hell out of that hospital now. Answer: True, true, for the love of God, kid, run!