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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/12/22

Oh my GOD she wasn’t talking about Lisa at all, she was talking about LES, this is a million times funnier than I could’ve possibly imagined! I had been joking that it was weird that the guy who wrote the script based on his own graphic novel/life didn’t get invited to the Oscar ceremony when his movie was up for an award, but then I remembered that Les was only the screenwriter for the original version of the movie, which was a cable TV version that Les killed when he stalked off the set in disgust, and then Mason revived the project years later with a promise that he’d do it “the right way” and also Les wouldn’t have to do any work. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of the WGA credit process, which is quite byzantine, but you’d think that Les would have still gotten his name on the movie, since I can’t imagine his original screenplay was that different from the final product. But the important thing is that he’s the real winner here, not the performer who apparently made this boring glurge-fest that nobody liked marginally bearable to watch, and he will soon have the Best Actress Oscar that he earned.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/12/22

I don’t buy this: the denizens of Hootin’ Holler don’t have access to complex machinery like “clocks,” so they wouldn’t get this joke. Instead, they tell time from the position of the sun. This is also why Snuffy wouldn’t be so casual with the phrase “daylight savings time,” which he by right ought to see as a form of mind control imposed by the tyrannical United Nations.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/22

It’s absolutely true that the average Beetle Bailey reader is of an age that they find cell phones in general and emojis in particular extremely “mysterious.”

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Shoe, 3/11/22

We’re all of course, familiar with Shoe’s patented goggle-eyes of horror and heavy-lidded eyes of ennui. But today we have what I think is a new one: the heavy-lidded eyes of horniness. See the Perfesser in panel two? That, my friend, is the face of a bird-man who’s about to go jerk off to some pictures cut out of pornographic magazines by the Czech scam artists who are catfishing him by mail, and it’s going to be the high point of his week.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/11/22

Speaking of masturbation, I guess I was wrong, Marianne is going to acknowledge Lisa, and in fact is about to announce that Lisa should’ve won this Oscar. She wasn’t an actress, of course, but she did die of cancer, which is the greatest performance of all, if you think about it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/22

Ha ha, these kids don’t understand the basic concepts of music! In a related question, how do you think the noises they’re making on those instruments sound? I’m guessing pretty bad!