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Mary Worth, 11/29/12

You know how you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor has written all kinds of psychology-y stuff on the whiteboard. “Um, ego, id … crap, what’s the third one? I know there’s a third one. Is it dreams? That doesn’t sound right, but half of every lecture is taken up by dumb nineteen-year-olds asking me to interpret their anxiety and/or sex dreams, so I might as well write that up there. Now, Freud and Jung … which one was played by Viggo Mortensen and which by Michael Fassbender? Gotta remember to look that up later.”

You know how else you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor’s lecture makes you visualize the angry, controlling, emotionally damaged young man whose romantic feelings you don’t reciprocate and think “I wish I could break down his barriers and make him love me — but only as a friend.”

Archie, 11/29/12

The Western calendar, derived as it is from ancient Roman and Egyptian models and tweaked over the centuries to match our increasingly accurate measurements of the earth’s revolution around the sun, contains months of varying lengths, leap days subject to complex rules, and a weekly cycle that doesn’t match up exactly with either the monthly or yearly cycles. This actually makes writing calendaring code a fairly tricky computer programming problem! Nevertheless, the rules for Thanksgiving are relatively simple — it’s the fourth Thursday in November, not the last Thursday, which means that someone on the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 programming team seems to have made something of a goof.

Crankshaft, 11/29/12

hate contempt rage bitterness misguided attempts to please a mother who can never feel love HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ALL OF US IN THE FUNKYVERSE, EVERYBODY

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/28/12

Is “boiling in oil” one of those phrases that only survives in occasional use because it rhymes? I mean, if you’ve heated up some form of oil to the boiling point, and put any variety of organic matter into it, you’d call what you’re really doing “frying,” right? Even if that organic matter is, you know, a dismembered human corpse. Ha ha, these knights are threatening Hagar and his men with a gruesome fate out of the most violent and depraved slasher flick, right here on the funny pages, in front of the children! Yet neither I nor anyone else can take the threat particularly seriously. Look, the colorists have even given everyone wooden swords. Nobody’s getting hurt in this battle!

Beetle Bailey, 11/28/12

And yet I find this Beetle Bailey grim beyond description, despite Beetle’s shaky reassurance that his mangled body will be restored to health tomorrow by narrative artifice. Still, imagine Miss Buxley gasping out “Oh, Beetle! You’re all broken!” in an exaggeratedly childlike Marilyn Monroe-type voice and try to tell me you don’t get the creeps. David Lynch directs!

Dennis the Menace, 11/28/12

Dennis is using an awesome book about bad-ass pirates to illustrate safety lessons for his younger friend. Menace levels: Undetectable by even the most powerful instruments.

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Very quickly, just want to let you know about two live events I’ll be doing next week!

• On December 4th in Brooklyn, I’ll be reading from The Enthusiast, my novel-in-progress, at the Animal Farm reading series. If you neglected to pre-order the book via the Kickstarter, you will have an opportunity to do so here! 8 p.m. at Legion Bar in Williamsburg. Click that link for more info, including info on other readers (one of whom is cartoonist Julia Wertz of Fart Party fame, with whom I trust you are all well acquainted).
• On December 8th in Baltimore, I’ll be doing stand-up with Doomhilda and Friends. 8 p.m. at EMP Collective downtown. Click that link for more info! But trust me when I say it will be super-hilarious, and I am working on a routine that will be appropriate for the first night of Hanukkah (and by “appropriate” I hope you understand I mean “wildly inappropriate”).