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Kudzu, 12/14/05

The Lockhorns, 12/14/05

Ah, marriage! When it goes well, how sweet it is! How it fills both partners with joy and helps bring two souls together as one! And when it doesn’t … well, then it’s delicious fodder for laughs, laughs, laughs! As if the last few weeks of Mary Worth divorce drama hasn’t been enough to prove that, we’ve got not one but two marriage counselor strips today. This Lockhorns panel isn’t “funny” per se (unless we’re talking about the oblate spheroid that is Dr. Pullman’s head, which is funny, but not ha-ha funny), but at least it stays true to the strip’s overarchingly bleak tone and subject matter. Look at Loretta’s face. A lesser comic would have had her smirking triumphantly at the fact that she always gets the last word, or have her brow furrowed with rage that her foibles were being aired in a public forum. But the Lockhorns never feels a need to step back from the brink of the abyss, and so Loretta’s face is just one of numb depression: she and her husband can’t communicate, her marriage is killing her, and the overpriced, bald-headed sub-Freud across the desk isn’t going to say anything that’s going to fix it.

Similarly, today’s Kudzu is true to that feature’s usual M.O., which is to say that it’s perfectly happy to cast aside even its wafer-thin sense of internal cohesion in order to follow some half-assed joke idea to its not-funny conclusion. I mean, why are they … that is, what is it supposed to … or, why should we … oh, forget it, just forget it.

One thing I and millions of comics readers will never forget is this little gem from today’s Judge Parker:

Watch it, April, he’s just going to show you “the claw” later himself — and he hopes you’re going to like it!

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Not to horn in on the excellent schtick of Comics I Don’t Understand, but … there are three comics today that I just … don’t understand. Perhaps you all can help me.

The Lockhorns, 8/11/05

So this is no doubt another small, passive-aggressive skirmish in the Lockhorns’ long-running war over money. I suppose the point is that by putting the sign on his car (after no doubt stealing it from the battered pick-up truck of some hapless pizza merchant), Leroy is trying to put a stop to Loretta’s wild spending habits. In so doing, he’s throwing back in Loretta’s face one her chief complaints about him — his inability to support her in the lifestyle to which she’d like to become accustomed. What I don’t understand is his facial expression — in this strip, the crooked smile and mussed combover hairs are usually indicators of drunkenness. Maybe here it signifies the shameful bravado of his making a defiant act of aggression out of his low-earning status. There’s another fatal flaw in his plan, of course, which Loretta seems to have recognized. You’ve got to get out of the car sometime Leroy, and when you do, that paltry paycheck is hers.

Willy ‘n Ethel, 8/11/05

OK, so The Lockhorns I mostly got after thinking a little bit about it. This one, however, is a little more opaque. There’s a lot of content here — a potentially humor-rich environment in which some kind of joke might lurk — but such a point is difficult to suss out. Ethel’s punch-card of deceit is inherently amusing, of course, but I’ve tried coming at Willy’s response to it from a couple of different angles and none of them quite work. Is he saying that if she ran a pizza parlor and left town after filling up a punch card it would be bad for business? Or that if she were running a pizza parlor he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from lying and thus filling up the card? Or that giving away free pizzas to liars is an unpromising business model? You’ve won this round, Joe Martin … but the war’s not over yet, I promise you that.

Marmaduke, 8/11/05

Sometimes, I don’t get the joke. Sometimes, I’m pretty convinced that there’s no joke to get. Marmaduke’s going for a walk. He stops to look at a bug. His annoyed owner, longing for the comforts of his slippers and his easy chair, wants Marmaduke to hurry up and move along. That’s it. Where’s the joke? Where’s the humor? Well, aren’t you demanding! If you aren’t satisfied with vignettes like this, the little grace notes of living with a big dog, then you don’t deserve to enjoy Marmaduke.

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The Lockhorns, 7/1/05

Rarely has the Lockhorns been accused of aiding and abetting the cause of good taste, but consider this: this panel could have described (or, worse, depicted) whatever kind of accident it was that somehow involved Leroy’s tongue. Think about it — but not too long, if you value your peace of mind.

Folks, the future Mrs. C. and I are off for a long weekend in the somewhat sunny San Francisco Bay Area, where we’ll be partying with our Left Coast friends and taking in a patriotic 4th of July wedding. This feature will return on Tuesday the 5th, or, you know, thereabouts.