Post Content

Mary Worth, 1/31/22

Look, have we be burned by Mary Worth before? Yes. Obviously. Repeatedly. Repeatedly in this storyline alone. But I honestly am beginning to believe that the endgame for this is in sight, and that endgame will be that either everyone rejects Wilbur so thoroughly that he experiences a social death more devastating than drowning, or, perhaps more likely, that everyone (including Mary, who’s long been willing to smile her way through his various terrible antics) is so thoroughly mad at him that he actually engages in … a certain amount of self-reflection and personal growth? Maybe?? If nothing else, Mary, who is notoriously not self-reflective, at least has managed to finally get off the “Wilbur is fine, actually” train. Look at those eyes in panel two. Those are they eyes of a killer! The eyes of a woman who can’t admit she’s been wrong, exactly, but can at least admit that she’s been wronged, and now it’s no more Ms. Nice Guy.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/31/22

I’ve been a fan for a while of the Showtime show Work In Progress, a slice-of-life comedy starring standup comedian Abby McEnany that’s part of the long-pedigreed “A standup comedian plays a thinly veiled version of themselves” genre. One of the things I like about it, and find really kind of unique, is that a lot of the jokes of the show take the form of banter between the characters that’s actually supposed to be funny within the universe of the show. Often in comedies of all types, characters deliver very funny lines to one another but react as if they’re talking to each other like normal people would, whereas a lot of Work In Progress feels like you and your friends sitting around trying to crack each other up, except each of you has an entire writers room at your disposal to write your dialogue. They’re diegetic jokes, if that makes sense.

Anyway, one of the few comic strips in which the characters acknowledge that they’re saying punchlines to one another are the Funkyverse strips. Unfortunately, the acknowledgement always takes the form of characters recognizing that they jokes they’re telling are very, very bad. Not funny at all! Everyone hates them! They make everybody mad! Look at how mad everyone is at Harry and Becky! How they can stand themselves?

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 1/28/22

Sad (?) news, everyone: it turns out Lisa didn’t fake her death after all. Instead, it seems that Les literally couldn’t tell the difference between his freshly dead wife and some neighbor lady (yesterday’s strip established that he saw her out by the birdfeeder), and also said neighbor lady decided that talking to Les would be a gross, unpleasant experience and so she didn’t bother doing it. That all is in fact extremely sad, but it also absolutely tracks.

Mary Worth, 1/28/22

Good (?) news, everyone: it turns out Wilbur is alive, which we knew, and that he managed to somehow shave and find a new shirt before he got around to letting all his loved ones know he wasn’t dead. Look how overjoyed and relieved they are! They’re in such a state of frenzied Wilbur-love that they’re about to group-tackle him and tear him to pieces, like the crazed Maenads at the end of Euripdes’ The Bacchae! That all is in fact good news, extremely good news indeed.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 1/26/22

I hate to say that Mary doesn’t understand even the basic outlines of the personalities of the people she spends all her time with, but I can guarantee you that, if Wilbur’s soul were looking down from heaven, he would very much not want anyone taking a stiff upper lip attitude about his death, but in fact would be achieving the angelic equivalent of physical arousal at the thought of various women weeping and tearing at their hair because they miss him so much. I’m reasonably sure that he’s taking his sweet time asking to borrow a cell phone from anyone on Party Island precisely so he can pump Mary for information about exactly how sad everyone was thinking he was dead. It certainly would be a shame if he overplayed his hand and everyone turned on him once he got back!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/26/22

Speaking of fake deaths, remember when Lisa called Les to stop him from getting on a plane, after she died, which was never really followed up on? What I’m trying to say is that Mary Worth couldn’t let us think Wilbur was dead for more than a week, but if it turns out that Funky Winkerbean has managed to fool us for 15 years, I will frankly be willing to forgive an awful lot.