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Well, no doubt like many of you, I got swept up in holiday madness last week, and am still playing catch-up in the non-gorging-on-turkey aspects of my life. What with the two Thanksgiving dinners, the Christmas gift exchange with the cousins, the rousing chorus of folk songs from the labor movement, the avant-garde play performed by elementary school children, and the specter of 24 straight hours of uncontrollable vomiting hanging over it all (what, your week wasn’t like that?) I haven’t had time to read the comics so you don’t have to. In both the spirit of the holiday and a desperate attempt to play catch-up, I offer you a week’s worth of comics and corresponding sentence-long things that I’m thankful for.

B.C., 11/23/04

I’m thankful that B.C., having already pissed off both Muslims and Jews, is now going after the Irish, ensuring its departure from the comics pages any day now.

Dilbert, 11/24/04

I’m thankful that public discourse has coarsened to the extent that the phrase “cow’s butt” can now be printed in the comics pages, because I think cow butts are funny.

Beetle Bailey, 11/25/04

I’m thankful that Beetle Bailey has discovered postmodernism, at long last.

Mary Worth, 11/26/04

I’m thankful for Boston, because they rock, man.

Family Circus, 11/27/04

I’m thankful that at least one member of this family is beginning to question the oppressive patriarchal suburban hell in which she lives.

Doodles by Mac and Sack, 11/28/04

I’m thankful that Mac and/or Sack were polite enough to add “please” to their request that I add horns and a bell to the grazing bovine in the bottom middle panel, though I admit that I could have done without the freakish hula-hooping cow above it.

Kudzu, 11/29/04

I’m thankful to Bill O’Reilly, who’s provided days and days of jokes to desperate comic strips everywhere.

B.C., 11/30/04

And now the handicapped. Yep, any day now…

Oh yeah, and one last thing I’m thankful for is this Jonathan Franzen essay about Peanuts from the New Yorker. It’s, like, good and stuff.

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Beetle Bailey, 11/11/04

Many comic strips today offered Veterans’ Day wishes to the veterans, and I of course assumed that the most militaristic of the comic strips would tip its hat towards the men and women of the military. I just didn’t think that it would do so in such a bizarre fashion. I guess the U.S. military really isn’t stretched as thin as all that, since the denizens are Camp Swampy don’t seem in any danger of being shipped out to Iraq. But still, while those who go and actually fight in wars get all the glory, we must remember to honor the forgotten veterans: those that stay in the U.S. and get the living bejeezus beaten out of them by their commanding officers for no good reason. Because remember, if their commanders weren’t taking it out on them, they’d be taking it out on you. At least, that’s the message I’m getting from Beetle Bailey.

Note to anyone seeking to infiltrate a military base for nefarious purposes: Pretend to be a flower delivery van driver! Army guys love flowers.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/6/04

I should say right off the bat tonight that the current drug-dealing storyline in Mary Worth attracts me so powerfully that it’s taking every ounce of willpower to not do that strip again today. But I know that you, the readers, deserve more variety, so instead I’m going to take on a very serious issue in the comics community: Overly Contrived Setup Syndrome, or OCSS.

OCSS is a humor malfunction that occurs when the author of a comic comes up with a punchline first, then works backwards to create an scenario to set up that punchline. For all I know, this happens all the time, but I would only offer a diagnosis of OCSS when the creaking of the machinery is painfully obvious. Take this Beetle Bailey, for example. The punchline: Sarge whistling because he accidentally ate a whistle — that’s funny! (It’s actually not, of course, but stay with me.) So, um, why did he eat the whistle? I know, because it fell into the stew! But why would it do that? Why would Lt. Fuzz be leaning over Sarge’s stew for it to fall in? That’s a pretty contrived scenario. You see that events become progressively less probable when you consider them in reverse order — a sure sign of OCSS.

OCSS is a symptom of gag-driven strips. Basically, some strips (I would say the better ones) are character-based, which means that the humor is derived … from … the …

Oh, no, I promised that I wasn’t going to do it.

Let me start again. In a gag-driven strip, everything’s about a particular punchline, which means that … it … doesn’t…

Mary Worth … crystal meth … must … resist … argh …

Oh, hell, I give up. Enjoy!

Mary Worth, 10/6/04

You know what they say — the first piece of gum is free!