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Hello everybody! Briefly interrupting your afternoon to give you two important pieces of news. First: as you may be aware, Rifftrax writer Conor Lastawka and I are co-minders of [Citation Needed], a Tumblr that highlights Wikipedia’s most hilarious bad writing. Yesterday, we released [Citation Needed] 2: The Needening, a collection of our favorite terrible Tumblr entries with added jokes we wrote ourselves!

You can buy it in paperback (less than $10!) or Kindle (only 99 cents, though slightly less bathroom-convenient!). And if you need proof of the book’s hilarity, you can check out the first 50 pages here.

Second: If you are in or near Baltimore, please come see me do standup with many other funny people this coming Thursday, June 6! Here is a poster which contains photo evidence that I am in a line up featuring actual comedians you may have heard of:

It will be at Delia Foley’s in Baltimore’s Federal Hill neighborhood, 1439 S Charles St. 8:30 pm and completely free! I urge you to attend, and laugh!

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Gil Thorp, 6/4/13

The dreary Gil Thorp spring storyline continues to plod along, with lawyer-spawn/aspiring lawyer Knox Foley (aka “Foley Knox,” aka “How am I supposed to keep track of which is your first name and which is your last name when they both look like last names”) still at the fore. His latest legal shenanigan: trying to convince his aspirational lady love that she should sue the grocery store where she fell and broke her wrist and UGH I can’t even work up the energy to make a joke about this. Mostly I want to point out Foley’s huge hand flopping around in the middle of panel three, like we’re playing in a first-person shooter video game except it’s not a first-person shooter, it’s a first-person poker or grabber or something. Giant meaty freak-hands have been the defining visual element of Gil Thorp since artist Rod Whigham took over in 2008, so it’s great to see a Thorp-flipper literally front and center here, and I wouldn’t be sad if every subsequent panel followed suit.

Beetle Bailey, 6/4/13

Less well known to Beetle Bailey regulars than “Miss Buxley Wednesday” is “The Halftracks loathe each other Saturday,” which today seems to be happening on Tuesday for some reason, maybe because we’ve crossed some sort of nuclear threshold of mutual hatred. Haha, it’s funny because General Halftrack is at the bar drunkenly boasting to his friends that he’s going to leave his wife! His wife is back home, stone cold sober, boasting to nobody in particular that she’s going to leave her husband, and it’s terrifying.

Family Circus, 6/4/13

Oh, man, just look at this guy! Billy’s pretty good at being smug, but this kid’s the master. “Teach me how to be like you, Eric! If I exude epic levels of self-satisfaction, will the ‘law of attraction’ bring me all the tooth-related revenues I deserve?”

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Slylock Fox, 6/3/13

Ha ha yes blah blah blah geography facts it’s the Pacific not the Atlantic very good, Slylock Fox, now let’s get at what’s really happening in today’s puzzle. Weirdly, self-appointed Count, green-skinned and twisted and one of the last remaining inhabitants of Earth that we might recognize as “human”, has an illegal island lab (forbidden by what legislation? Does Slylock even know the sources of the law code he so ruthlessly enforces?) where he dabbles in genetic experiments. Experiments that might explain a little something about the strange menagerie of creatures ruling the crumbling cities where human beings once lived. Experiments that might transform a species of smallish and clever but nonsentient canids into bipeds capable of ratiocination and operating an airplane and distinguishing between — well, if not between right and wrong, then between what is permitted and what is forbidden. Assuming that Slylock’s enhanced intelligence gives him the skills to somehow land a jet plane on a tiny island with no airstrip, the worst that’s in store for Weirdly is that he’ll be hauled before an animal-run judiciary and thrown in an animal-guarded cell. Slylock, meanwhile, will find out some harrowing details about himself, about where he came from, about his relationship to his Creator. Somewhere in the endless levels of blood-stained cement-walled corridors below that island, there is a cage, and inside that cage is a fox, a fox that doesn’t wear a deerstalker or walk on two legs or solve crimes. It just skitters back and forth in its little prison, eating pellets and drinking water from its automatically refilled bottle and hissing at whoever comes into the room. Will their eyes lock when Slylock finally enters this chamber? Will they both finally understand what has happened, the one with only dim animal instincts, the other with terrible clarity?

Apartment 3-G, 6/3/13

Never mind whatever’s happening with Marty and her dad. Let’s all give a big hand to Doris, who received a Laurel of Merit at the Purple Olympics!