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Beetle Bailey, 10/6/04

I should say right off the bat tonight that the current drug-dealing storyline in Mary Worth attracts me so powerfully that it’s taking every ounce of willpower to not do that strip again today. But I know that you, the readers, deserve more variety, so instead I’m going to take on a very serious issue in the comics community: Overly Contrived Setup Syndrome, or OCSS.

OCSS is a humor malfunction that occurs when the author of a comic comes up with a punchline first, then works backwards to create an scenario to set up that punchline. For all I know, this happens all the time, but I would only offer a diagnosis of OCSS when the creaking of the machinery is painfully obvious. Take this Beetle Bailey, for example. The punchline: Sarge whistling because he accidentally ate a whistle — that’s funny! (It’s actually not, of course, but stay with me.) So, um, why did he eat the whistle? I know, because it fell into the stew! But why would it do that? Why would Lt. Fuzz be leaning over Sarge’s stew for it to fall in? That’s a pretty contrived scenario. You see that events become progressively less probable when you consider them in reverse order — a sure sign of OCSS.

OCSS is a symptom of gag-driven strips. Basically, some strips (I would say the better ones) are character-based, which means that the humor is derived … from … the …

Oh, no, I promised that I wasn’t going to do it.

Let me start again. In a gag-driven strip, everything’s about a particular punchline, which means that … it … doesn’t…

Mary Worth … crystal meth … must … resist … argh …

Oh, hell, I give up. Enjoy!

Mary Worth, 10/6/04

You know what they say — the first piece of gum is free!

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Mary Worth, 10/5/04

Because when you’re feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, what you really want to take the edge off is some meth.

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Herb and Jamaal, 10/4/04

Many people reading this blog no doubt think to themselves, “Josh, why do you always have to hate on Herb and Jamaal? Why be a player hater? When does the hating stop?” I say unto you: today is the day.

One of the great challenges of the comic artists to express a number of non-verbal cues via word balloons, whether that be surprise (see panel three here), a combination of surprise and befuddlement (see last week’s Phantom commentary and the surprisingly erudite community discussion it spawned), or belching. It’s the burping that drew me today’s strip, as you can probably guess. Sure, my friends know me as an Ivy League graduate, urban hipster, and (dare I say it) danged cultural elitist, but they also know that I appreciate a good belch — whether doing it, hearing it, or reading about it in the paper.

Anyway, I’m most intrigued not by the rather pedestrian transliteration of BRAAAPHHH for the main burp, but rather the post-belch noises on the second line of the second panel’s text. Are we to understand these sounds to be secondary and tertiary belches, or do they represent the sort of post-burp glottal events that can follow particularly noisy and satisfying releases of intestinal gas? Only extensive experimentation can resolve the issue, but consider this when planning your preliminary lines of investigation: the typeface shift in the first panel clearly denotes differing volume levels of drinking noises, but everything in the second panel is at a consistent font size, with an absence of punctuation, to boot.

Another phenomenon of note is the collection of bubbles around Herb’s head. (I’m pretty sure that it’s Herb, but there’s a small but non-zero chance that I’m wrong and that it’s actually Jamaal.) Now, normally these would symbolize some sort of chemical (or, in rare cases, romantic) intoxication, but the clearly labeled can of SODA (Hey, kids! You don’t need alcohol to have a good time!) indicates that these little roundels actually represent the expelled CO₂ itself. All and all, its an interesting intersection of chemistry, anatomy, and class conflict that’s still guaranteed to get a laugh out of the all-important 8-to-13-year-old demographic.