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One Big Happy, 9/19/04

One Big Happy is one of those strips that I can’t decide whether I like or not. Sometimes it’s really funny, generally when it depicts all too accurately adults pushed to the edge of their sanity by the irritating behavior of children. (One of these days the Playground Lady is going to snap, and it’ll be all over the 6 O’clock news, I tell ya.) This cartoon has some promise too, with the bizarre picture of the skating donkey, the very idea of an ice show version of Don Quixote for children, and (another of my favorites from the strip) one of Ruthie’s misplaced outraged rants. So therefore I’m very sad — no, let’s say disappointed — that the whole thing is a set-up for a Family Circus-style malapropism. You can get away with that sort of thing in a three-panel daily, but using an entire Sunday strip to lead into a pun as lame as this is just completely unacceptable.

I still think the donkey is funny, though. Ha ha, it’s a skating donkey! In a sombrero! And it’s really two people in a suit! Hoo boy.

By the way, going to the One Big Happy page at Comics.com gives a series of One Big Happy “classics” that are out of sync with what I get in my paper. Anyone know what the story is there?

This week’s alarming search terms: “blubberybastard” (from the Italian version of Google), the all-too-familiar “miss buxley nude” (from Yahoo!), and, most intriguingly, two separate searches from people trying to figure out what Snuffy Smith’s parents’ names are. I no more believe that there are two different people who independently want this information than I believe that the Family Circus Web server gets overwhelmed by traffic (which claim I encountered anew last night), but the referrer logs say that those searches came from two separate computers in two separate cities. Maybe there’s some kind of online scavenger hunt underway? Anyway, if they’re named anything other than “Maw” and “Paw,” I’ll eat my hat.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/04

For my money, I say we don’t get nearly enough of Margo’s stereotyped, somewhat accented mother in Apartment 3-G. But this week’s sequence, in which she looks into Margo’s future and gives her vaguely ethnic premonitions of danger, makes up for her long absence. It doesn’t take a mystical knowledge of the fortune-telling arts of the old country to guess that Margo is going to get into trouble on any given day, of course, and anyone less self-absorbed than our scheming brunette publicist would have noticed that her new client is more Ernst Bloefeld than George Soros. Still, I appreciate a good card reading — we need more of them in the comics.

(I should say here that I guess I’m only assuming that Gabriella is Margo’s mother. I can’t figure out what else the relationship could be, though Margo, that saucy career girl, always calls her by her first name.)

Bonus observations: Margo may not know of two opposites in one heart, but she certainly seems well aware of two different degrees of collar flip-up in one cartoon. And I don’t want to know what she’s doing with her hands in the first panel.

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Family Circus, 9/17/04

OK, so, there’s the harmonica, see …

And, um, it’ll be on the cell phone … cell phones are annoying…

And Jeffy can’t really play the harmonica (I guess that’s why the “try” bit is in there) …

And that’s funny because …

Aw, hell, I admit. I don’t get it. You win this time Bil Keane. This time.