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Crankshaft, 12/16/22

Hey, did you know that “deja vu” means “seen again,” and that “vu” is the past participle of the verb “voir,” which means “to see,” and that an earlier form of the same French word entered English after the Norman conquest and gave rise to the English word “view”? Or, to put it more succinctly, did you know that “view” and “vu” are basically the same word? And so this isn’t really much of a pun or anything at all? I know the bar for Crankshaft wordplay is very low, but surely it should be higher than this?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/16/22

It probably won’t come as surprise to you that I’ve been reading Mother Goose and Grimm for a long time, possible since it first launched in 1984. I have a vague memory that Ralph (the Boston terrier) was not an original character, but was introduced some time into the strip’s run, maybe? But if so he’s been around for years. Years. You’d think … Grimm would know if his friend had a job? Or at least, some politics weird enough that he’d she tears over Mr. Potter?

Crock, 12/16/22

I’d like to think that whoever on the Crock creative team wrote this strip in the 1990s or whenever this first ran had heard of boom boxes, by which I mean had heard the phrase “boom box,” but didn’t really know what they were. A box that booms, probably? That’s why they call it that, right? Not sure what the box looks like, better not draw it, but we can be pretty confident about the booms.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/22

You absolutely cannot make me care about this conversation Rex and June are having about not having any more kids, but I am profoundly unnerved by the way each frame is a closer and closer zoom in on one of their faces. Here’s hoping this trend continues and by Sunday we just have word balloons emerging from six panels of undifferentiated, featureless pinky-peach flesh.

Family Circus, 12/16/22

Uh oh! Big Daddy Keane’s gonna get arrested!

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Dustin, 12/15/22

I always criticize the comic strip Dustin for its failure to depict its young-person characters in realistic ways, so I have to give credit where credit is due: TikTok is, in fact, an app that young people enjoy, and where you could watch many hours of dance videos, if you so choose. Now, young people do not come away from an evening of TikTok dance video viewing looking like they’ve just watched a solid six hours of disembowelments, like Dustin does here, nor do they make these kinds of execrable puns, but, you know, baby steps.

Judge Parker, 12/15/22

“Uh, no, Steve, my version is at least kind of plausible, whereas yours doesn’t really make sense at all. How much blood have you lost, exactly?”

Family Circus, 12/15/22

“So put some damn pants on. Fun time’s over!”

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Zits, 12/10/22

The thing about dad jokes is that they are corny but actually perfectly constructed. Think about the classic “I’m hungry!” “Hi, hungry, I’m dad.” It’s corny as hell but pure and precise and not clunky at all. Claiming that Harley-Davidson underwear is the same thing as “a Harley” represents a failure to respect the linguistic disconnect — “underwear” is not a singular noun, you would never say “an underwear” or anything like that. This violates the form of the dad joke and I declare Walt a dad joke moron.

Family Circus, 12/10/22

Speaking of morons, I was going to go on a whole riff here about how “horn” and “corn” derive from the same Indo-European etymological root, but you know what? Billy’s too dumb to ever appreciate it, not that I’d be explaining it to him, obviously, but still: it’s wasted on him, thematically. And you! It’s Saturday, maybe I should go outside!