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Dilbert, 11/5/04

Ziggy, 11/5/04

One must assume that psychiatrist jokes popped into the pop culture ether about a week after Freud hung out his shingle in Vienna. There’s nothing like the experience of opening up your innermost thoughts and feelings to serve as a subject for uproarious humor and cruel mockery; the New Yorker cartoonist staff has been making hay from this for decades, and of course Lucy van Pelt is the Jungian archetype of the hostile therapist. But when you have a cartoon character whose whole purpose is to be a case study in haplessness, well, you get results like these, where cartoon characters as old school as Ziggy and as (relatively) new school as Dilbert are the butts of what is essentially the same joke. I do have to say that this Ziggy is all the crueler because he looks like he’s about to burst into tears (the dark circle under his eye is a nice touch). Dilbert at least can stick up for himself. Also, apparently the fact that Ziggy is lying on a couch and talking to a bearded man in a suit with a notepad doesn’t convey psychiatry clearly enough to the unwashed masses, because there’s a little sign to that effect hanging in the background.

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Mary Worth, 11/4/04

OK, now that we’re almost done with this crystal meth story line on Mary Worth, let’s review the things that we’ve learned:

• Drugs are bad
• People never change
• You shouldn’t give anyone a second chance, even if they’re your own child, because they’ll just break your heart
• Once someone has failed you twice, you really ought to just write them off
• Don’t buy drugs out of an open brown paper bag, as they’ve probably gone bad
• Meth can go bad
• Blue sansabelt pants, a Members Only jacket, and a Eurotrash ponytail do not make for a cool ensemble
• When a mother becomes extremely upset about her son’s misdeeds, her face develops black splotches and she starts talking like Bronte heroine

By the way, Iris, I’m sure that Tommy learned plenty during his time in the joint. Sadly, it was less about the chemical composition of pharmaceuticals and more about making shivs.

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Herb and Jamaal, 11/3/04

Herb and Jamaal loves to do strips in which poetry by African-American writers accompanies some moment in the lives its characters. Which is all well and good, if potentially infringing certain copyrights. But usually there’s some at least vague connection between the poem and the action in the strip. Here, all I’m getting is: “Herb’s mother-in-law: she exists, and she lives in this house.” Which doesn’t have anything to do with the poem, as near as I can tell.

So, here’s my challenge to you, IRTCSYDHT readers: come up with some poem that fits this strip better than this one! I’ll take the best ones and Photoshop the new text in (or, more likely, ask Photoshop blackbelt Dalton to do it). We’ll show that we can beat Herb and Jamaal at its own copyright-infringing game.

(You know, now that I’m looking at it again, Herb’s mother-in-law is looking oddly … busty … in that last panel. You don’t think “walk a high wire” is some kind of wire bra reference, do you?)