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Folks, if you were wondering when my beloved live show, The Internet Read Aloud, would return to the stage in Los Angeles, good news: it’s returning in three weeks!

Here is the Facebook event! I would love to see you there to tell jokes to your face!

But until then, our laffs will come from this comment of the week:

“But where the hell are Dennis’s parents? Aren’t there usually adults in line with the kids, to provide properly shocked reactions to the saying of darndest things? Have these children simply been handed over to Santa as some sort of tithe? I mean, this would explain why Santa is responding with the facial expression of one of the classier Borgias. ‘This one … ceases to amuse. Remove him.’ [screams, clanking of irons, whimsical jingle bells]” –Skedastic

These runners up are also very funny!

“Too often our holiday-obsessed government holds us down with bureaucratic red tape and restrictions like Santa clauses. Better to let the gift-giving free market self-regulate with laissez tooth-faire.” –jroggs

“There is something truly disturbing about the way that Dustin’s dad says ‘We have a whole house.’ That’s right folks: those two are fucking in every room, on any available surface, just to check it off their sick list. The real danger comes when the list runs out.” –pugfuggly

“Santa Claus is the great Leviathan, the symbol of chaos and envy, yet also of unity, inspiring fear in humans and providing the undergirding of a society riven by factionalism and competition for scarce goods? It’s unusually deep waters for Henry, Alice and their offspring, but A+ philosophizing from a high school student. It will all be undone once Dennis finds out Saint Nicholas is the patron of pawn brokers, though.” –pastordan

“The word ‘Fragile’ under an arrow pointing at Dennis’s dad leads me to believe that Henry will be crumpled on the floor weeping before the night is over.” –Pozzo

“Mystery solved. Estelle took Wilbur back because she missed the free ribs.” –Ukulele Ike

“Doc Pritchard doesn’t bother to instruct Snuffy to keep it dry while bathing, it’s only on for three weeks.” –nescio

“I know there are any number of activities, all of varying shades of illegality, that Snuffy could have been engaged in when he broke his arm, but the part of me that loves dramatic symmetry prefers to believe he was caught cheating at cards.” –TheDiva

“Of course Rex is swearing. If this story goes viral, everyone’ll know Sarah’s his daughter, his daughter whose face only a mother could love. Not him. He’s her father. He doesn’t have to love that face. No one can make him.” –Baja Gaijin

“Viral? That sounds like one of those pesky facts they kept pushing on me in med school… think, Rex, THINK!” –DevOpsDad

“I’ll bet that’s exactly the sort of calculating look the real Hank Ketcham would direct at his real son. ‘Your insolence could be … very profitable. Very profitable indeed.’” –Tom T.

“‘If my luck holds,’ the hit-man thinks, ‘like on that Little Mermaid job. All I had to do was wait until she got transformed into a human, and she was like a fish out of water! Heh, heh, heh. No wait, am I thinking of shooting fish in a barrel? Whatever. Point is, she’s dead.’” –Peanut Gallery

“‘Ya know,’ Nu-Frankenstein thought bubbled, ‘if we just hired a normal looking palooka who didn’t have a horrible deformity or dressed like murder clown or whatever we could get him some clothes from Old Navy or wherever people without tailors buy their t-shirts and he could probably just walk up to Dick and shoot him in the back. Dick would never see it coming, what with him not looking like a mummy who escaped from the museum.’” –jerp+jump

“The Dick Tracy exhibit at the Neo-Chicago Main Library appears to have been curated by Quentin Tarantino. From the lurid colors to the floral blood spatters, the bass-heavy music overlaid with interviews with gravely voiced villains, it brings first a headache, then nausea, and finally surrender. Surrender to the violence of the state. But the last room, dark and quiet, merely lists the names of those shot down by Tracy during his storied career, and the viewer is left to ponder: what did these deaths mean? Is Neo-Chicago safer with these malformed souls in the dirt and not the streets? Are we, the public and taxpayers that permit such violence on our behalves complicit, nay, culpable, in Tracy’s reign of fascist police violence? And therein lies the genius of the piece. Sadly, it was shut down this morning by Tracy, who shot the head librarian, calling him ‘Book Face.’ Three stars.” –Voshkod

“Is no one going to address that Tater is clearly an old man posing as a baby in some sort of Looney-Tune-esque scam. It has been 87 years, why is nobody saying anything.” –Dan

“Hi, remember me? I’m Rocky, the Beetle Bailey supporting character whose gimmick is that he’s into that newfangled rock music. I believe my pompadour and sideburns will corroborate my identity, but if you need further proof, I invite you to look at my novelty underwear. Hey hey HEY! I said look at!” –Joe Blevins

“Dear Mom and Dad, I have no money for a cellphone plan or internet access and I am reduced to writing on paper. The stamps were a gift from Plato, whose podcast is sponsored by stamps.com.” –Ettorre

“If you have one of the few comic strips that are still run in newspapers, you have to keep thinking of fun suggestions for why anyone would still want to buy newspapers, including dumb kids’ craft projects requiring old newspapers.” –lorne

“Crankshaft playing Santa in Lillian’s book store, that’s an interesting choice from a business perspective. I barely understand how she stays afloat in the first place, I can’t imagine she’s getting a ton of foot traffic to her obscure suburban location. So I guess, yeah, I can see why she would try to take in a little extra on the side by letting Crankshaft’s family pay her to keep him busy for a few hours every day.” –BananaSam

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar, or back me on Patreon! Thanks to all for your support and readership!

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WHOOMP HERE IT IS COTW!

“This is the most sexual this strip has ever been or will be again. Ten years from now the fans will still be talking about that time a gal on the wrong side of the law indirectly referred to her [insert Depression-era slang term for ‘breasts’].” –Lee Sherman

RUNNERS UP TOOOO

“I’m convinced that nothing in the funny pages has the comedic verve of two parties having a gentle, amiable chat where they conclude that Wilbur’s not such a bad guy, then smash cutting to Wilbur slipping further into his pursuits of being the worst guy.” –Notbooked, on Twitter

“The bonus joke in that last panel is that Granny has ben wandering around for 40 minutes looking for the linen closet.” –pugfuggly

“The most obvious reading of ‘NOGUNCLOG’ isn’t ‘Nog Unclog’ but ‘No Gun Clog,’ so presumably Crankshaft has just been knocking back bottles of solvent meant for cleaning out rifle barrels.” –Schroduck

“That is a terrifyingly precise GPS on Blondie’s phone. I wanna check if Dithers runs a military contractor or something, but probably not. Not because I think Dagwood would refuse to work on projects like that, I just don’t think he could resist licking his chops, imagining food, and saying stuff like ‘precision scone strikes!’ or ‘acceptable collateral ham-age!’” –Dan

“I’m more concerned than I should be that Snuffy’s butt-kicking, while inarguably long overdue, has broken him so completely that he refuses to acknowledge that it even happened. That, and that he now says weirdly stilted things like ‘A stiffly starched curtain, then,’ apparently. How he’s even become aware of the concept of dry cleaning is a thread to be pulled another day — I can only withstand so much cognitive dissonance from my comic strips in one sitting.” –Doctor Moreau

“So you can’t buy a doorknob in Hootin’ Holler but you can find 36 x 20 overalls?” –Mikey

“I’m so amused at how checked out so many of the characters are to their own snooze-worthy stories. I’m pretty sure panel #3 would have would have been exactly the same if Rex had, say, mentioned Sarah caused the explosion that rocked downtown a few weeks ago.” –2+2=7

“Of course Trixie has trouble walking. She has only three toes. Three toes!” –Guillermo el chiclero

“Institutions tend to replicate themselves, so the firefighters need a pyromaniac to justify their existence. It’s social ecology and it’s beautiful.” –Ettorre

“Is this going to be Hi and Lois’s go-to joke structure for a while? ‘It’s amazing how actors can remember all those lines — I can’t even speak!’ ‘It’s amazing how scientists cure diseases — I think a sunbeam is a person!’ ‘It’s amazing how baseball players hit home runs — I can’t go to the bathroom on my own!’ Yeah we get it Trixie you’re a baby and you can’t do anything!” –jenna

“It would be very funny if we went through this whole media circus in agonizing soap opera time, weeks of people being interviewed, the Morgans fretting about what this unwanted attention could do to Sarah, all for it to wrap up in a month when the interviews are edited down to a thirty second package that gets bumped at the last minute when somebody sends in a home video of a raccoon that got stuck in their pool.” –BananaSam

“Who knew that the overall message of Mary Worth was ‘There is no God?’” –Applemask

“Once again, we have to wonder why the owners of a condo complex in one of the most expensive beach cities in the U.S., in the hottest real-estate market ever, would devote acres and acres of prime property to landscaped walking paths instead of developing them. (‘Oh, wait,’ said the armchair detective who’s been on the case for years, secretly following the exploits of Santa Royale’s most notorious creep. ‘That’s where Wilbur’s bodies are buried!’)” –BigTed

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar, or back me on Patreon! Thanks to all for your support and readership!

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Time keeps on slippin’ into the future, and it’s now the first comment of the week of the last month of 2021:

“For all that Mary talks Wilbur up, she would flounder in a heartbeat if someone suggested that she just date Wilbur herself. ‘Oh, he’s … charming in his own endearing, quirky way but not that I would. I have standards … I mean, I’m loyal to Jack … John … J-Jeff … the doctor.” –Needless_Exposition

Runners up are hilarious as always!

“Grandpa longs for the days when gorillas were seen masturbating and not heard.” –Scratchy Scrotum LXIX

“Nancy may be a villain, but she’s still a Rex Morgan villain and she knows the importance of doing her job as slowly and ineffectively as possible.” –TheDiva

“Enjoying the truly demented economics of buying cheap wine by the barrel, then decanting it into a bottle, but then still pricing it by the barrel. The real comedy here is the terrible restaurant management.” –Schroduck

“DID YOU KNOW: Microsoft PowerPoint was released 34 yea– no, you know what, we don’t even have to get this detailed. DID YOU KNOW: The 21st century has been underway for over two decades, at least a quarter of Lillian’s life, if not closer to a third.” –Dan

“Look, I can accept that Maggot and Grossie have no chins. I can accept that Grossie’s mouth somehow magically exists on the outside of her face covering. I can even accept that the chin-privileged waiters don’t remark on these things out of some sense of etiquette. But if you’re going to introduce wine into the equation, I need to see Maggot tipping the top of his head back like a trash can lid, I need to see Grossie pouring the contents of her glass into the moving target at the center of her chest, and I need to see the waiters running off into the desert, where they’d rather die of heatstroke and dehydration than witness such horrors ever again.” –Doctor Moreau

“Hi and Lois: Putting the ‘app’ in ‘appetite’ since … I dunno … today, I guess.” –Pozzo

“Once again, players from the football team are standing on the cafeteria tables and yelling nonsense about their personal lives. Milford High School must be a surreal place for the students who don’t participate in Gil’s authoritarian sports regime.” –jroggs

“‘Jay Walker, eh? Guilty. Death by exsanguination out at Split Tooth Rock. Lordy, appeasin’ the blood thirst of the ol’ gods sure got easier after we set up this fake court and just sacrifice every minor offender.’ ‘Exsangen-wha’, yer honor?’ ‘Bleedin’ out, Smif. Yer guilty too, of disrespectin’ the court. Out to Split Tooth with ya.’” –Voshkod

“You know how many leg lifts it takes to get butt muscles to get that Easter Island chin look? A lot.” –Jerp+Jump

“Just look at Curtis’s dad’s expression in the final panel. That is the look of a man who has seen some shit. Ghost shit. All over the bathroom. Thank god he finally persuaded that damn ghost to flush the toilet after its unholy acts of defecation, he thinks wearily to himself.” –glitchcraft

“The secretary is fresh from the agency, so she hasn’t learned to say things like, ‘Lam it, it’s the fuzz!’ yet.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“Sure, you can ‘be yourself‘ around Wilbur — I mean, who gives a shit what Wilbur thinks?” –Deacon Blues

“I can’t believe that Roz — jaded, seen-it-all Roz — would be truly shocked by this feeble punchline. So my head canon is that she does this sarcastically whenever her customers crack wise.” –Joe Blevins

“Loretta doesn’t need Twitter when she has access to internet’s premiere platform for long-form essays: YouTube. Just imagining a page full of videos with titles like ‘My husband sucks (and I have the receipts!)’, each over 3 hours long.” –pugfuggly

“The Red Shirt’s stance in the Lockhorns is the best thing that comic has had in a while. He looks not only angry at the Lockhorns but at the reader as well.” –BeckoningChasm

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar, or back me on Patreon! Thanks to all for your support and readership!