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Mary Worth, 6/10/23

Look, I am a huge animal lover. My wife and I have two cats that we dote on and spend a probably unreasonable amount of time thinking and talking about. We also trapped and neutered many feral cats who made their way through our neighborhood, and three of them now live in our yard full-time, and we feed them even though none of them will lower themselves to allow us to pet them or anything. If any of them were to disappear one day (something that is inevitably going to happen with the ferals), I would be devastated. And yet even in my grief, I would never assume that the fate of one of these beloved creatures would ever be worthy of coverage on the local news. I’m sorry, I know Santa Royale isn’t a big media market like Los Angeles, but there simply isn’t a news day slow enough for this.

Judge Parker, 6/10/23

Remember when Sophie was a weird tween and used her telescope to spy on her sister doing “that tongue thing” with a long-forgotten boyfriend? She sure took it all in stride then, just wryly smiling at the thought of it, though I guess it’s a little more surprising to physically stumble into your recently divorced parents making out than it would be to observe the human mating process from a safe distance through a specialized scientific instrument.

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That’s right folks: it’s the 2nd Friday of the month, and you know what that means: LIVE ON-STAGE COMEDY IN LOS ANGELES, FROM YOURS TRULY!

Here is the Facebook event! Go forth and proclaim your allegiance to me and my stable of laffmasters!

Even if you steadfastly refuse to come to the show, you can still enjoy the comment of the week:

“‘Vape crime? Marty, let me tell you a little about how we roll around here,’ he said as he opened his anarchy-black Honeycrisp laptop. ‘Ain’t no crime if there ain’t no law.’” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

And laugh at the hilarious runners up!

“Looking forward to seeing Dick Tracy punch out a guy with a vaguely telephone-shaped head a few weeks from now.” –Rex Thrillhouse, on Twitter

“So where’s the paisley??? You can’t drag in ‘paisley’ as some sort of dreadful decorating choice and then go with solid yellow walls and solid green countertops for the background in every dang panel. You bring up paisley, you effing DRAW THE PAISLEY, Tom Armstrong! I suppose you think that, just because no one wants you to draw the perennial poop, you can just sit down on the job like this. NO SIR! This is sheer laziness and phoning it in, and I, for one, am disgusted!” –Twinkles the Elf

“Okay, so, the writers of Dennis the Menace go, what, about half a century without any new named characters, then one Sunday we get CJ, Bailey, Dodger Dog and Coach Mark? Looks like somebody got a memo from Corporate, rebelled mentally for a few minutes, then decided, ‘Okay, fine, whatever.’” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“While Toby and Mary chat, Ian sits down for lunch at his favorite back alley restaurant, ‘The Barkery.’ ‘Hmm, today’s special is hotdog.’” –Hibbleton

“I love how Mary insists that Toby inform her about any Greta sightings, instead of Saul himself. ‘Saul is in an emotionally sensitive place right, now, so it’s important that we manage the flow of information. Also, I have a few really great pearls of wisdom to lay on him, but they only really work within a few specific situations, so I really need to be there…’” –pugfuggly

“Look at Dagwood’s hunched posture, putting him eye-level against the smaller, but better postured, blue collar worker. The underpaid creative staff of Blondie are secretly exposing the bourgeois degeneracy of the upper middle class having to slouch and come down to the level of the newly empowered and rising working class. Daisy certainly senses the shift in societal relationships, and she is worried class resentment will spiral into violence.” –Philip

“I may not be his biggest fan … that of course would be the president of the Old Man Wynter Fan Club. But I do subscribe to their newsletter. It’s a good hate-read.” –Peanut Gallery

“Luigi Pirandello’s Six Creatures in Search of a Roadrunner and Coyote is one of his lesser known plays for a reason, but bravi to Slylock Fox for trying to stage it.” –Voshkod

“Joel with a smartphone feels very weirdly anachronistic. As opposed to the continued existence of Gasoline Alley as an ongoing comic, I guess.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“The donkey is actually the region’s top neurologist. Rufus is in good hooves.” –Mrs. Jon Arbuckle

“That’s true, our ad did say there was no dress code. I am now realizing that might have been a mistake, and should probably take the chance to fill the position while I haven’t been exposed to more than bare feet.” –pachoo

“I was all in on today’s strip, then I realized that the donut has eyebrows. Donuts don’t have eyebrows!!!” –Weaselboy

“I would have thought that Leroy was a sexist pig who would only interact at parties with women he saw as sex objects. But he is open to talk with a normal-looking woman if it serves humiliating his wife. Which is … better, I guess?” –Ettorre

“No chyrons? No crawls? No graphics? Santa Royale TV News fills the whole screen, Mary. You don’t have to sit a foot and a half away from the TV.” –astroboy

“Classic June Morgan. Someone tries to tell a story with possibly interesting conflict and June shuts that shit the fuck down.” –jroggs

“Mary still hasn’t connected this crime wave to the very existence of her favorite local TV show, The Lost Dog Hour.” –BigTed

“Gil’s eyes are simply welling up with tears. He’s probably flashing back to his own addiction in college. They used to call him Three Pack Thorp. Yep, he could tell you some stories. (He can’t, but I can dream.)” –made of wince

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Dustin, 6/9/23

Under The Skin is a truly great and unsettlingly weird movie that is, probably, about an alien who’s been sent to Earth to capture and harvest human beings for food. I say “probably” because that’s what the book it’s based on is about, but the movie is quite different in a number of particulars and what’s happening in it is never spelled out for you. Scarlett Johansson is the main character, and is definitely not human, and as she wanders around Glasgow, seductively luring men back to a house where they get submerged into some kind of liquid void, you see everything more or less from her perspective, which makes human society seem alien as she tries to understand and navigate it. I’m not going to give away the rest of it, as you should watch it and it’s free to stream on Kanopy, a service you can access with your public library card, but yes, Johansson does get naked in it, and in the context of the movie it is ultimately profoundly unerotic. Anyway, I love it a lot, obviously, and it has kind of a cult following but very few people actually saw it, which makes it a bizarre thing to build a comic strip punchline around, so I assume that today’s Dustin has Dustin’s dad, possibly my least favorite character in all of present-day syndicated newspaper comics, say all this as an attack on me personally. (I’m joking, of course: I actually assume this strip is a result of someone discovering that there was only a single movie in Scarlett Johansson’s filmography in which she appears nude, which resulted in an anticipated masturbatory session that went terribly wrong.)

Gil Thorp, 6/9/23

You have to respect Marty Moon: he could’ve just texted Gil those pics he took of the Mudlarks doing vape crime (the dorkiest kind of crime there is), but he went to the trouble of getting them printed out so he could flash them in Gil’s face in person before throwing them down on his desk. This is just proof that you don’t spend a lifetime covering high school sports without learning a little something about drama.