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Archive: Rex Morgan, M.D.

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Bad scenes

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/20/24

Look, I’ve been to plenty of comedy open mics in my time, and the thing you have to keep in mind about them is that they are generally extremely depressing and poorly attended, and the people who do come are invariably all comics looking for a few minutes of stage time who are staring at their phones or mentally running through their sets when other people are performing and who inevitably leave once they get off stage — slinking back home, if they’re lucky, or trying to find another mic, if they’re truly in too deep. Anyway, my point is that you don’t normally see a bunch of people sitting there watching attentively as in panel one. The Glenwood entertainment scene must be truly dire if this many people are coming to see an open mic that allows literal children to perform, and those children are trying to make a genre they’re calling “neo-vaudeville” happen. Are there no roots country concerts these poor souls could be attending instead? Has it really come to this?

Hi and Lois, 8/20/24

It’s pretty funny how exasperated Hi looks in the second panel. Wow, Hi, sorry your kids are taking an interest in your professional life! Although I do think the ribs thing isn’t realistic; it seems more likely that Dot’s initial Google takeaway would be more “Wait, Kansas City is in Missouri? What the heck!”

Hagar the Horrible, 8/20/24

Ha ha! It’s funny because Hagar and his family will freeze to death in the bitterly cold Scandinavian winter!

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Swift resolution Sunday

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Six Chix, 8/11/24

Honestly, to me, this didn’t seem like a very desperate measure at all! It seems like she just mentally recited a nursery rhyme and that allowed her to exercise superhuman power over the weather. Who knows, though, maybe she’s exhausted herself from the effort. Maybe she won’t be able to move out of her chair for hours. Maybe she won’t have the powers to deal with some truly catastrophic climactic event down the road and thousands will die because she wanted to read outside for an afternoon! Lots of world-building possibilities here.

Marvin, 8/11/24

“Ah, so you say the constant shit and piss jokes are wearing you down. Well, uh. What if a dog had fleas. What if you told a dog not to take its flea collar off, but it did anyway, and now it has fleas. That’s a joke, right. Like, structurally, you definitely would look at that and say ‘That’s a joke,’ right? Legally speaking, if anyone tries to not pay you because you’re being paid to write jokes, I mean.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/11/24

So Parker decided to not file charges against Randy after learning the latter had been brutally beaten by his own father. I guess we have a long and emotionally fraught but ultimately fascinating journey ahead of us as we explore the limits of forgiveness and restorative justice and learn whether the cycle of violence can ever be truly broken. Oh, wait, what’s that? You’re saying that Randy mysteriously left town and we’ll never have to deal with him again? Huh. Well, that’s a lot tidier, for sure! I guess all our problems are solved, once again!

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Look at how thrilled Loweezy is at Jughaid’s exhaustion. Truly cruel

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”