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Today’s not just the first day of December, but also the first Friday of December, which means my comedy show at the Clubhouse in Los Feliz, The Internet Read Aloud, is tonight! Please come, you will not regret it, this is my promise to you.

Here’s the FB event! IT’S GOOD STUFF GUYS

Speaking of good stuff, here’s this week’s comment of the week!

“Is your mother home? I told her I’d stop by on my way to Music Man rehearsal.” –Pozzo

And here are the exceptionally funny runners up!

“Please let this be the only instance in which the title card ‘Dennis the Menace: 21 and older‘ is ever used.” –pugfuggly

“I like the fact that even when depicting the impossible concept of talking Pilgrim turkeys, Gasoline Alley manages not to stray from traditional gender roles.” –BigTed

“Good to see that even famously neutral Switzerland will happily try to kill Hagar.” –Schroduck

“Moe was the brainiest of the Stooges, and Jeffy knows he’s not up to it.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“*extreme cowboy voice* y’see I came here to, uh, give candy bars to grizzlies and [looks at cue card] fuck shit up. And I’m ALL out of [quick cue card glance] candy bars.” –katakana haru, on Twitter

“The most disturbing thing about this Family Circus is that it’s just Billy and Ma Keane. Are there some double indemnity shenanigans afoot?” –Stop Motion Cyclops

“Somehow, the new title of this strip, MARK TRAIL: VOICE OF REASON, seems to lack a little pizazz.” –Shrug

“Years from now as the nation lies awake at night in terror of the ‘Not-Me’ Killer, Mother Keane will remember this moment.” –Dread

“I kind of love how specific Mark Trail is about where Dirty is taking a walk. ‘Will Dirty decide to take in some Latin stand-up comedy at the Flamingo Theater/Bar? Perhaps he’ll go around the corner and stop in at the Guatemalan consulate! Find out next time on … MIAMI CONSTITUTIONALS.’” –Dagger33

“Just imagine Dagwood’s plump, full lips wrapped sensually around a turkey club on rye. He pouts as a dollop of spicy dijon mustard escapes the corner of his mouth, his tongue darting out to retrieve it. Somebody, somewhere is enjoying today’s Blondie way way too much.” –Escape Zeppelin

“Hey, a newspaper box! I lost my eye to a newspaper box. It was a bleak and muggy dawn outside of Lubumbashi, deep in the Congo. Belgian paras had occupied the airfield, and Mutanga had broken out of prison. The city smelled like copper and death, and the sun didn’t even try to push away the gloom, like it was afraid to gaze down on that little corner of hell. The Mai-Mai were cutting off hands, and the Army was on the run. The whole city was poised on the edge of a massacre, we were all holding our breath, afraid of tipping into the abyss. An impotent tank rolled down the Chaussée de Kasenga and starving children threw rocks at it. The air was full of waiting vultures. Then I saw the newspaper box, and there was a sale on mattresses! I put in my 10 francs but opened the door too damn fast. Took the handle right in the eye.” –Voskhod

“You’re a plugger if the main difference between your husband and your pet is which one gets the treats.” –Dan

“Tingling Brothers! I used to love their ‘Cavalcade of Neuropathy!’” –Peanut Gallery

“See, this is exactly why Wilbur should have put aside his broken heart and stayed at least a few extra days to get those salsa lessons. He’s going to regret foregoing what would have been his only remaining competitive advantage against Zak.” –GDBenz

“You’re a plugger if you submit a joke about a woman who thinks a young man is staring at her, when he’s actually staring at the TV behind her. However, you’re a slacker if you draw a cartoon based on that premise, and it shows no young man staring at the woman, and the TV is turned off.” –seismic-2

“I’d like to know how Dennis managed to master The Doorknob Principle. His arms just don’t look long enough to have reached the latch. On the other hand, this could be just another indicator of a bygone era, when people left their front doors wide open, all the time.” –Charterstoned

“Men rarely jump through hoops/ For girls who eat soups.” –Ukulele Ike

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Dennis the Menace, 12/1/17

Despite the strip’s occasional acknowledgements of modernity, a large part of the appeal of Dennis the Menace, to the extent that such a thing could be said to exist, lies in its depiction of a retrograde, bygone world that is comforting to its elderly readership but would be wholly alien to actual five-year-olds. This is a neighborhood, after all, where children of various ages are allowed to roam unsupervised seemingly at all times, which must seem very weird to any children reading it (fortunately no actual children are reading it). Today’s panel has a whole series of anachronisms:

1. A door-to-door salesman
2. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day
3. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day wearing a suit and a bow tie and saddle shoes
4. A five-year-old-child allowed to answer the door for a total stranger
5. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day and at least appearing to entertain the thought that a five-year-old child might have been left in the house alone

Anyway, I guess the joke here is that Dennis has blown his mother’s cover when she’s trying to avoid talking to a salesman, which only makes sense if we find #5 there believable, and which I guess makes Alice the true menace, since she’s sent her child to the door to run interference with some rando while she stays upstairs in the bedroom huffing laudanum or whatever. I think a more modern and menacing version of this joke would be Dennis saying he was home alone and asking the salesman to call Child Protective Services, just because he wanted to go for a ride in a car.

Pluggers, 12/1/17

Today’s Pluggers fascinates me: it tells a whole little story in its caption, but in the panel itself depicts the moment before the denouement, the moment when its plugger protagonist allows herself to briefly entertain the idea that someone might find her desirable, before it all comes crashing down in a moment of internalized embarrassment. In its own quiet way, this is just as grim and heartbreaking as that crushing Pluggers classic, “Rhino-man hocks his TV.”

Family Circus, 12/1/17

Family Circus has a reputation for being one of the most Christian comic strips in the newspaper, and yet here it is depicting a child confusing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with the pagan fertility god whose iconography has, through the corruption of this world, been grafted onto what should be the subdued celebration of His birth, and then playing it for laughs. I guess this is just meant to show us that children really are born sinful and ignorant, doomed to Limbo without the interceding grace of Christ, working through the Holy Mother Church and its variety of reasonably priced educational programs.

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Mark Trail, 11/30/17

FACT: Chris “Dirty” Dyer is a notorious animal poacher who enjoys nothing more than dismembering majestic, endangered beasts for his own profit.

FACT: The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus was in its final years mired in numerous controversies regarding its mistreatment of elephants and other animals.

CONCLUSION: Chris “Dirty” Dyer was from a young age a sociopath who reveled in grotesque animal-torture entertainments.

ALTERNATE CONCLUSION: Chris “Dirty” Dyer was a normal young boy who had his ability to feel empathy for animals deadened as he watched cruel circus taskmasters heartlessly treat noble elephants as unfeeling objects while the audience members around him jeered.

FACT NOT RELATED TO THE FOREGOING BUT STILL IMPORTANT TO NOTE: The “Tingling Brothers Circus” definitely sounds like the porn parody version version of the Ringling Brothers Circus.

Mary Worth, 11/30/17

Hmm, so what I’m taking away from Iris’s dialogue in panel one is that she may not be as familiar with as wide a variety of sex acts as Zak might be accustomed to with his younger partners, but the ones she does know she knows very well, as she plans to show Zak repeatedly until Tommy gets back from Goleta 48 hours from now, Mary’s passive-aggressive notes slipped under the door about Charterstone’s noise regulations be damned.