Distasteful Thursday
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Mary Worth, 3/19/26
Say what you will about the evil gangs that are keeping “Trixie” captive in a Cambodian compound, but you have to respect that they let their enslaved workers customize their laptop’s UI. Going to a no-distraction, all-text screen for chatting with a mark really helps you get into the zone, you know? Like you can get into your character’s headspace and try to figure out what she might say that will ring true and also separate your victim from his money. Unfortunately, “Trixie” seems to have botched it: Harvey’s facial expression looks less like “Oh no! I must hurry to the nearest Western Union, post-haste!” and more “Hmm … devastating injury … perhaps a lifetime of impaired mobility … this is not aligning with my acrobatic sex plans for when we meet up … who else is out there on this app, I wonder?”
Gearhead Gertie, 3/19/26
Look, I don’t want to say that there’s only so many jokes you can make in a recurring comic panel that is committed to only doing jokes about NASCAR. I’m just saying that today we got to “You know what can interfere with your enjoyment of NASCAR? Your neighbor’s leaf blower. What if there was someone who loved NASCAR so much … that she did something about it,” which, honestly, having typed that out, I actually think is pretty good. I hope we go further down this road. Gertie will stop at nothing to remove all distractions from her monomania! She will leave a trail of dead behind her, you must remain silent at all times
73 replies to “Distasteful Thursday”
Gertie is… right? What is even happening?
Shoe – Skyler got it wet, didn’t he?
RMMD: How terrible to be rich and famous.
MW: I, for one, always type my scam emails with my fingers held beyond the keyboard itself. Palm-typing, I call it. I make a lot of typos, but that’s unrelated.
It’s cool that Harvey got a phone emblazoned with his favorite Tetris piece.
MW – H@rvey’s ascot just went limp.
It’s cool that Harv got a phone emblazoned with his favorite Tetris piece.
Crankshaft-Bristol board is a paper? I thought it was the drawing board he was working on. This is what happens when you are half reading the comic.
Luann-Let’s talk about how much Les needs to date and then laugh about his attempts to get dates.
RMMD-She did drop some unsightly two hundred pounds when she dropped her agent.
MW-“Well that’s my limit. I’m not paying for anybody’s surgery.”
Blondie-Dithers won’t say for fear of incriminating himself.
Blondie-“Dagwood, I can tell you where the former office managers are not buried, in the foundation of this building.”
FC: Like a good owner, Bil always “picks up” while walking his Jeffy.
GG — Is Gertie sitting in her neighbor’s house? I’m confused by this strip and frankly I don’t like the feeling.
RMMD: in the name of taking things far, far too seriously I have questions. I assume that 30 years ago, in the before times, Mae Mae was a hottie-a young Sydney Sweeney. Now she’s in her 40s and no longer a svelte hottie. I have trouble believing he recognized her so quickly. Were they close? Has been following her career? Has he ever written a song about her, his angel in the centerfold?
MW Cool to see that in the Marieverse, you can bold text in SMS messages. Makes sense, given what an important part of speech it is there.
GG ” Also there’s not a tree for miles so what the fuck is he blowing??!”
@Lauralot:MW: I, for one, always type my scam emails with my fingers held beyond the keyboard itself. Palm-typing, I call it. I make a lot of typos, but that’s unrelated.
Hey “she’ has just been in a major car accident, remember? It’s called method acting.
@But What Do I Know?:
Yeah, the gag would flow better if the houses were reversed in the first panel; Neighbor should be facing GERTIE’s as he talks to her in the following panel.
Also : GODDAMMIT SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A SMEAR OF GIBS AND GORE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GRAND CANYON WHY IS SHE BACK
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Mary Worth : H@rv’s reaction isn’t one of sympathy and of having been suckered into sending money to his online girlfriend, it’s one of “Good Heavens!? Paralysed from the waist down!? …That complicates things, I don’t know if I can be attracted to an INVALID…”
***********
Moose & Molly : Chester is angry in the last panel because he was going into this pity party to fish for Moose going “That’s not true, Chester! *I* like you!”, but he’s noticed the first 20 items on this list are reasons why Moose doesn’t like him.
MW: Suddenly, Harv recalls that before he retired, HE was a SPINAL SURGEON! “You can STILL come for a visit, Trixie! I’LL do the surgery, and at a STEEP DISCOUNT!”
MW: So, have they never actually spoken, or does Stubble Boy do a mean falsetto?
RMMD: I’m no expert on unhealthy relationships with food…oh, wait, I am…and I NEVER have my my Bucket O’ Carbs without a book or TV. Make it count!
H&L: DING, DING, DING! We have a career plan for the boy!
“That loud machine is interfering with my enjoyment of all the loud machines” is certainly… what’s above a first-world problem?
GG Uh, folks? The joke’s that the leaf blower sounds like the roaring engines, right? And she loves the cars but the noise is a bit much without the fun race, right? Right?? I mean, at least that would be a joke!
MW: My darling Harvey… I was decapitated in an auto accident and now survive in a laboratory pan… I desperately need a temporary host before a donor body is procured… Your broad shoulder and ascot are perfect… I long to finally be together with you, my love
GG: Great comic strips often work at least in part because they strip down their world to a few elements, with the artist doing endless variations on the theme. I’m thinking of Krazy Kat-George Herriman did decades of strips on the love triangle of Krazy Kat, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup, set in an empty New Mexico landscape. I guess what I’m saying is lose the leaf blower, Gertie.
Gertie’s neighbor has evidently bought into the “skinny house” trend that’s sweeping the nation.
@pugfuggly: You’re right. I should not judge this Oscar-worthy performance.
MW:
“Of course, notwithstanding our ostensible closeness, I don’t expect you to be suspicious in the least about the fact that I’m communicating this devastating news to you by typing it to you out of the blue, as opposed to, say, initiating a video chat.”
Gertie: The leafblower was one thing. The sunflower head on his pillow was a bit much.
Mary Worth: “Trixie” scowled at the keyboard as he typed. The bosses were watching, they were always watching. He had just seconds to decide: was it worth the risk of a beating, or worse? The tension was excruciating. His fate hung in the balance. Would he dare to send a grammatical, perfectly-spelled email?
Gearhead Gertie:
“By taking that leafblower, I’ve committed a common-law crime named after a famous single-panel cartoonist: ‘petty Larson-y’ !”
GG: Well, if Gertie’s hearing is so acute that she can hear her neighbour muttering to himself across the street, then a leaf-blower must be TORTURE.
MW: The people running the Honeytrap Farm must be using a chat program that locks the user out of all other applications, like universities use for exams. That means that poor “Trixie” can’t even decompress with a hand of Freecell between sessions of sexting with old men.
@pugfuggly: The lack of leaves does not stop our neighbor, who likes to blow the blades of grass off her lawn every night after dark, because leaf blowers apparently come with headlights these days? Anyway, it definitely ruins our “Planet of the Apes” marathons.
@Liam: On Luann – They aren’t even talking about how much he needs to date. They are talking about him the same way Luann and Bernice talk about Tiffany, i.e. he doesn’t *deserve* to find love because he’s such an asshole. I mean, they aren’t wrong, Les has consistently been written as a smarmy, sullen jerk who’s always on the make for either money or whatever the Evansii’s equivalent of sex is. Still, pot meet kettle…
Speaking of which, buckle up for some more DRAMA!! when Les gushes to Tiffany about his ‘date’ and she goes all ‘But *I* am the one attracted to you! *I* am the one who’s been coming over to play this stupid video game and flirting wildly with you! You *owe* me!’ Basically she’s going to pull the reverse of Ox from the ‘Let’s do a car wash scene but with a dog’ storyline from a few weeks ago.
P.S. I’d honestly forgotten about this little gamer connection Les had with Tiffany. I guess my little ‘I don’t do fat chicks’ crack the other day was misdirected at Mud when it should have been directed at Les.
GG: Of all the sports, I’d think that loud cars going in a circle would be least impacted by the roar of a leaf blower.
JP: POV: You’re Alan Parker and Bogdan is slowly pushing the phone closer and closer to your face for dramatic effect.
SlyFox: Some of you may think Polybius is a shout out to the urban legendary psychoactive MKULTRA CIA experiment game that supposedly drove its players insane, Videodrome-style, but that would be far too hip for this strip. No, Slyock is likely giving us shoutout to the 2nd century BCE Hellenistic cryptographer of the same name.
GG: Gertie is about to realize that the annoying whirring engine she’s been hearing during NASCAR races isn’t her neighbor’s leafblower.
Gearhead Gertie: “I got tired of hearing that during the race,” Gertie says, looking up to her god. “Give it back,” Dale Earnhardt says, from beyond the grave. “And for your penance, attach it to a 358ci small-block with a single 830-cfm Holley carburetor.”
Gearhead Gertie, alt joke: “I got tired of hearing that during the race,” Gertie says, as her Dolby Atmos theater system recreates the roar of NASCAR engines, weakening the structural integrity of her neighbors’ foundations.
And also Mary Worth: Harvey’s filthy rich, a proper mark for any scammer. You can tell by the ascot and the phone with four lenses.
MW – Hey! The tear glands are properly placed!
GG – The real problem is that the leaf blower sounds so much like a race in progress that Gertie mistakes it for another car and roots for it if she can hear it.
“Why does Gertie look like that?” has topped my list of comics-related questions for a while. It’s hardly consistent, but the other characters in her world are usually normally proportioned.
Seeing the neighbor’s house helped me figure it out, though. She’s a Playmobil minifig! One of the weird, blocky ones you buy for younger kids. Anyhow, all of this strip is just a NASCAR-obsessed kid (or adult, I suppose) banging a mish-mash of action figures together. Kind of a dumb kid, who mostly imagines adventures that involve television? I don’t know, I’m still workshopping it, fellas.
MW: “I need spinal fusion surgery. That a mix of rock, funk, R&B, and world music surgeons. It’s very expensive.”
GG: What drove a mild-mannered suburban man with no Scottish ancestry to take up bagpipes…
Hey, what’s with “Gravel Gertie” anyway? Gravel makes a terrible racetrack—no traction, and the pebbles fly everywhere. Get with the program: “Tarmac Tessie”, “Asphalt Annie”, “Brickyard Betty”, or nothing!
@MKay: MW: So, have they never actually spoken, or does Stubble Boy do a mean falsetto?
To get real for a minute, there is software that would let Stubble Boy video chat with HH and change his image and voice in real time to that of “Trixie”. We run into this problem at work, where we do job interviews by video chat — people use it for identity spoofing, to pretend to be someone who’s legally allowed to work in the U.S.
Returning to the un- reality that is Mary Worth, I’m leaning more toward the idea that HH — with Mary’s assistance, of course — will somehow rescue Stubble Boy from the criminal gang. Yes, it’s ridiculous and unbelievable, but two words: telepathic dogs.
Exciting authentic sports action in Gil Thorp, which at times makes me think of the sketches from “That Mitchell and Webb Look” where David Mitchell and Roger Webb play a pair of incompetent and lazy screenwriters who cannot be bothered to do even the most basic research, whether they’re writing a medical drama, a legal drama or an “inspirational underdog team” sports movie about cricket – as seen the cricket players swing their bats like baseball bats, every team member carries a bat on the field and wear mismatched casual clothing instead of uniforms.
FG: Bok realizes he’s been rumbled, probably by the ol’ sinister Queen Azula, and he just rips the bandage off instead of trying to keep up the pretense, and hoping Ming doesn’t turn on mood lighting and sultry music.
CRANKSHAFT: “I came to enjoy the feel of the brush as it moved across the paper, so smooth, so…sensuous….” :Batton closes his eyes and breathes deeply, the interviewer is somewhat disturbed instead of smiling along with his subject for once:
MT Let’s add to the it-doesn’t-make-a-lick-of-sense “Crass can’t develop his already-owned land because the city could approve somebody else’s idea for that plot” that the development is a sports complex a drive out of Las Vegas. Surely there’s something more profitable than dealing with the design and AC bills to make a huge dome stay at a reasonable temperature in the baking-hot desert? like another casino or housing?
SF This is a strip that could actually pull off Alice reminding Sally of their actual friendship, asking whether there’s been some timeline retconning going on, then having them either go back to that or realize that with Sally’s rewritten memories she just can’t be friends anymore – but parting at peace with each other. They *won’t* but they *could* and a better writer would acknowledge they screwed up years of in-strip characterization to get some anti-boss stuff and wouldn’t double down on it like this.
H&L: Can’t Ditto draw GT? It would be quite the improvement.
RMMD: “…until I got sick of that. You see, lying in bed eating from a punch bowl full of cheese curds isn’t as glamorous as it sounds.”
I would never have guessed that if Gearhead Gertie was going to get political, it would be a devastating commentary on the US justice system. Here we see that Gertie has committed a crime and the reader’s first thought is, “Good, once they catch her she’ll finally get the help that she needs.” But as you think about it more, you realize that no money is going to be spent on psychiatrists, she’s just going to spend a few years locked up, just getting angrier and angrier that she’s unable to watch any races, until her cell mate has enough and shanks her.
Well done on the lack of hand holding, Team Gearhead Gertie!
I want to snark more on Mary Worth, but this is a story line its largest demographic needs to read.
JP: “so we can’t come home because of reasons and don’t want people to bring trouble to you, so we’ll send Bogdan who was known to be with us, to tramp his way to your place. I’m sure no one will notice.” Meanwhile NotCIApril when she hears Randolph sent Bogdan with money off without telling her (she had been scouting places to dump Bogdan’s body after she shivs him) does a Homer headslap.
Phantom: This is why when Patrolperson Han mounts her coup and topples the Colonel, these people are all on KP duty!
MW: When does Harvey let Mary know? When he is hit up for more money “Complications – please wire $10000” or when his daughter contacts Mary? Or when he is tapped out and comes to Mary for a loan?
RMMD: Since she was a rare female action star (Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Angelina Jolie) her management would have been working 24/7 to broaden her options. Most of, if not all of these stars have production companies (even if it is just 2 other people) It isn’t the 1930-1950 studio system.
JP: We didn’t want to risk trailing the bad guys to you, so we let Bogdan do it for us! Thanks Randolph! April is shaking her head. She goes out to look for a place to dump Bogdan’s body and when she comes back Randolph has given Bogdan a chunk of their money, made the video and sent him with the address to JP. Great tradecraft Randolph!
Pluggers: I thought Pluggers were against participation trophies.
Luann: What on earth is the joke here? Les manipulated his test to get a rock climbing date with Tara that he can’t physically do, but he plays a weird mobile game, but Tiffany actually likes that game? I know “Tiffany takes Les to a spa and he simulatenously gets her interested in this weird game” was recent arc, but what does that have to do with anything going on here?
CS: I just had a horrifying thought. What if this “interview” is Tom Batiuk writing his autobiography, which he intends to publish as his final collection of comic strips? At 500 pages per book and 2 pages per week, this could go on for almost five more years.
I’m impressed with the scammer’s ability to maintain the exact same amount of beard stubble, week after comic strip week.
“My darling Harvey:
I went for a balloon ride with an old biddy and a girl who thinks to animals, and I urgently need a brain tr ansplant!”
@Ukranazi Stepan: Yeah, but it’s not half as impressive as Mary’s ability to wear the same purple outfit every day. Besides, why wouldn’t criminal gangs provide personal grooming tools to their kidnapped laborers? Office morale is important to productivity!
Mary Worth: I’m sorry, but this guy is not good at his job! When you’re deciding on a fake ailment, why choose something so disturbing and potentially disabling? What “Trixie” should be writing is “My darling Harvey… I’ve come down with a devastating local disease, and will surely die if I don’t get a certain new medication. It’s extremely expensive, partly because people are taking it off-label – they found out that it makes women prettier and thinner, yet somehow also makes their breasts bigger. Please help so I can come see you!” I guarantee he’ll be Venmo-ing that money as fast as possible – meaning just as soon as he can figure out what Venmo is.
Gearhead Gertie: Yes, race cars are pretty loud, and they do in fact make a roaring noise that’s not so different from a leafblower. The more current way of doing this joke would be if she was bothered by the thock-thock-thock! sound of her neighbor’s pickleball game, so she stole his balls and paddles. The sound of other people playing pickleball is in fact very annoying – there have been lawsuits over it!
MW- not having read more of his texts, I think that Harv, Mary and Toby believe it to be a girl, if this is true, if he can escape, Hollywood would snap up a writer who can write in an authentic female voice.
Gearhead Gertie stole this joke from Footie Fan Florence, where it was about stealing a vuvuzela. Triple F, as the fans call it, stole the joke from Natatorium Nate, where it was about cementing over a neighbor’s pool to prevent splashing noises. But all of these jokes go back to Caesar Chuckles, a short-lived engraving series found in the ruins of Pompeii, in which Nero kills everyone’s dogs because their barking interferes with his enjoyment of the roar of lions in the Coliseum. Truly, humor is universal and timeless.
Mary Worth: “Darling Trixie. . . Drop me a note when your back feels better. Good luck, and best regards!”
@Banana Jr. 6000: On Luann – no joke, but merely DRAMA!! as we are reminded that Les is supposed to be chasing after Tiffany because she a bitchslutwhore who also happens to be his soulmate because they happen to enjoy the same videogame and have absolutely nothing else in common. Tiffany’s going to be put out (but not actually put out) when Les brags to her about what a smooth operator he is by getting a date with Miss ‘I bring deadly weapons onto school property’ by openly cribbing her answers on the Teen Beat personality test being taught at the local JuCo.
You can’t blame Gertie. Everybody knows [checks notes] NASCAR fans can’t tolerate [checks notes] loud [checks notes] engine noises [checks notes] [feeds notes into wood chipper that’s been running this whole time]
MW: “Oh my darling Trixie! I must fly immediately to Edison, New Jersey, to be with you!.”
Mary’s Meddlesense kicks in, and she starts packing her lavender suitcase.
GG – Where’s your leaf blower? I’ve got a better question: How come you have what appears to be a half-car garage?
@Myrtle: Honestly, that *would* be an expected response. Bit dumb for a scam script, really.
@The Quiet Man: Thank you for the explanation, but I’m still puzzled. The morality of this world is confusing. The only bitchslutwhore behaivior we’ve seen recently was from Luann, who was implicitly shamed for it. Like most quasi-Christian communities, the only consistently-applied moral is “We’re right. You’re wrong. The end.”
GG: Since it’s a fine spring day with no fallen leaves or even snow (I’ve had neighbors break out the leaf blower to take care of a slight dusting on the driveway), I can only assume the neighbor wants his leaf blower to drown out the sound of Gertie getting way too enthusiastic over the NASCAR Cup Series.
MW: Harvey looks like Big Bird back in the days when he was trying to convince everyone that Snuffleupagus was real but nobody ever believed him. If Snuffleupagus was really a front for a pig-butchering scam, that is.
GG: Since it’s a fine spring day with no fallen leaves or even snow (I’ve had neighbors break out the leaf blower to take care of a slight dusting on the driveway), I can only assume the neighbor wants his leaf blower to drown out the sound of Gertie getting way too enthusiastic over the NASCAR Cup Series.
MW: Widower Hart looks like Big Bird back in the days when he was trying to convince everyone that Snuffleupagus was real but nobody ever believed him. If Snuffleupagus was really a front for a pig-butchering scam, that is.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
On Crankshaft, and the Bat
iukTON THOMAS biography : except, these anecdotes are all just stories he’s already told in the prefaces and introductions of the various volumes of the collected Funky Winkerbean, so wouldn’t it cut into THAT? Nevermind that Batiuk posts excerpts of those prefaces and introductions FOR FREE on his public blog!Low And Hi-less: “We’re twins,Sherlock! Make fun of me, you’re making fun of yourself!”
CS – The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol when they use the Bristol board. They don’t, however, go on and on about it.
@Liam:
“….Unless that surgery was for a bigger rack, of course.”
Dustin: I’m going to gently suggest that a man in his forties who’s still eating Cocoa Bombs for breakfast is in no position to be complaining about his son’s lack of maturity.
JP: “I mean sure, we want to come home to our annoying dysfunctional family and boat anchor of a child, but…there are things. You know, other things. That we have to do.”
MT: Tad does know Vegas has a sports arena, right? Several of them?
Pluggers can’t tell the difference between a Monet and a five-year-old’s drawing of a flower.
SH: Oh, so he can’t throw the game for literal loan sharks, but he can throw it for diplomatic reasons?
@Anonymous: I didn’t say it made any sense. I’m saying it feels like something Batiuk would do.
GT: “Keri can throw a key through a keyhole!”
“Well that’s great, but she needs to stop that and protect the basketball.”
ZING!!
“There goes her car key!”
SW00SH!
“And through the keyhole!”
“Meanwhile it’s four on five and Tech scores again!”
Mary Worth: Mary Worth is so devoted to ensuring that no ethnic minorities ever appear in significant manner that even when they introduce a character who is explicitly from Cambodia, he’s a pasty white guy devoid of any asian features whatsoever.
JP: “So in order to earn our living in the interim, we’ve joined the circus. As you can see, I’m in the Clown Tent right now, and April is employed shoveling up the elephant bowel movements.”
Phantom: ”Square is the word, all right. Have you heard those Lawrence Welk bootleg cassettes he plays in his quarters at night?”
RMMD: “Seein’ nobody, not even my Beverley Hills hairdresser.”
GT: Sure, Coach Gerads is a hot-headed, thin-skinned, chapped-lip, ear-whispering weirdo creep but is ultimately a ridiculous figure. Mimi on the other hand? Stone-cold ruthless. Her willingness to exploit her inside knowledge of ex’s and her own child’s weaknesses, on or off the court, humiliating them in front of their colleagues, and peers just so she can rack up another W would make even Sun Tzu or Machiavelli blanch.