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Hello all! Just a brief note that if you will be in the Baltimore area in November you will have not one but two opportunities to see me do standup comedy! Here are the details (links to Facebook events, you should be able to see the info at least even if you are not a Facebook user):

• On Monday, November 4 (that’s this coming Monday!) I’ll be doing in a group show that’s part of the Charm City Fringe Fest. It’s a group of very funny Baltimore comedians organized and hosted by the great Stavros Halkias. The show is free, and is a great excuse to drink booze and eat the best pizza in Baltimore (no lie) on a Monday. Doors at 8:30, show starts around 9.
• On Saturday, November 16, I’ll be in a show organized by the great Michele Wojo at Sully’s Comedy Cellar in Parkville. There’ll be both improv and standup for your amusement! Tickets are $15 and you can reserve yours online. Show’s at 8:30. This is a clean show, so feel free to bring anyone who hates swear words. (The November 4 show will literally consist of nothing but jokes about genitalia.)

And now, your comment of the week!

“A year is about how long it will take for the Dawn-Wants-To-Express-Herself and Tommie-Tries-Not-To-Be-Boring twerking storylines to appear in Mary Worth and Apartment 3G — two years for Jack Elrod to figure out a wilderness/environmental angle on the subject — three years for the word ‘TWERK’ to inexplicably appear on someone’s t-shirt in a ’90s Archie. (Anyone who remembers the Frank McLaughlin era will recall that Gil Thorp was once nothing but twerking.)” –David Lynch’s Pompadour

And your runners up! Very funny!

“I’m sure Heathcliff used to make some kind of intuitive sense.” –C. Sandy Cyst

“My favorite aspect of this strip is the shrunken, boxy-looking extra who hobbles through the scene in the last panel in order to remind us what ‘regular people’ actually look like. ‘Don’t mind me, girlies. I’m just trying to get back to my table before my brisket gets cold. These cruises … so expensive, am I right? You go on with your little scene. Now where has Harold gone? Harold, that’s my husband, you see. He’s wandered off somewhere. HAROLD! Oh, I’m sorry, missy. I didn’t see you were on the phone there.'” –Joe Blevins

“Mark is awfully nonchalant about the fact that his little scam has misfired and resulted in the death of one of its targets. Especially since he still doesn’t know what nefarious secret they were trying to hide. Maybe Johnny and the Senator are lovers? Maybe they were working a long con, trying to actually save the wilderness by going undercover? Eh, he’s dead now, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Now how about some pancakes!? Speaking of pancakes, you should see how flat those corpses at the bottom of the mountain are!” –Calvin’s Cardboard Box

“Hmm, one student riddled with anxiety having a nervous breakdown, another student content to have bubble gum slopping up his face. I think its time we re-examined the No Child Left Behind Act and possibly amend it to the Okay, Lets Be Realistic Act.” –Chareth Cutestory

“To be fair, illiterate pluggers are unaware that this is not actually how you read books.” –Guillaume de Machaut

“Using the flower petals for scale, I’d guess that bee is about four inches long. Sting Jeffy, mutant Terror Bee! He’s right there!” –Duke of Earl Grey

“A sign that just says ‘Halloween’ and not ‘Happy Halloween’ is probably a big seller in the Funkyverse.” –nescio

“‘How does a father tell his daughter that the man she loves is no good?’ ‘Oh, Dad, all I have to do is look at your voting record … oh, did you mean Johnny?'” –Christopher

“This must be set before Martha Stewart got all crafty, or else once she got out of stir. Albert Brooks is really in for it this time.” –Little Blue Bicycle

“I do believe ‘Oh, Great!’ is the accepted universal response to hearing that Rex Morgan and his wife are coming to dinner.” –Digger

“No-one realizes that Apple Mary is still running the streets (how else does she afford Charterstone and all her victory tours?) Now, she’s known as ‘the Artful Codger.'” –Maltmasher

“The Adventures of Inkwell Trying To Figure Out If Toni’s Brother is Supposed To Be Unsympathetic Or Not continue! They’ve been dull.” –Inkwell

“Meanwhile, back in Riverdale, for the crime of proclaiming himself #1 and placing himself over our Dear Leader, Moose is led away by the secret police.” –Voshkod

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! And as always, we must give thanks to our advertiser, who has sponsored the mobile version of the site this week:

• Help teens with depression: Think it’s right for teenagers to feel like the Lockhorns every day? This is a reality. Help end it by supporting A Bold Choice Theatre Company’s IndieGoGo fundraiser! Let’s get teenagers with depression the help they need!

To find out more about how you could be thanked in this spot, and more about sponsoring this site’s mobile version or RSS feed, click here.

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Archie, 7/31/13

One of my favorite Idle Comics-Reading Pastimes involves trying to figure out the original publication date of any given stretch of Archie newspaper comics reruns. The use of Beanie Babies as a cultural touchstone places this one pretty firmly in the mid 1990s. Along the way, the strip also reveals the shortcomings of the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000’s linear humor-logic. Presumably its legal module made sure that it used the generic “bean bags” instead of the registered trademark “Beanie Babies,” a formulation that I’m pretty sure no actual human ever uttered. This leads into a distasteful punchline about Jughead making sweet love to whatever soft, cushy surface is most capable of enabling his extreme laziness.

Hi and Lois, 7/31/13

The bedroom eyes Hi and Lois are making at each other here imply that this “dressing up” banter isn’t so much about “weren’t things better in the ’50s, when women’s autonomy was strictly limited” so much as it’s about “I’d sure find it sexually arousing if I came home to find you dressed sexily, for sex.” It’s a weird conversation to have right in front of the kids at the kitchen table, but it’s also weird to have the kitchen table three feet away from the front door of your house, so who am I to question how they do things in this family.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/31/13

Ha ha, but wouldn’t it be funny if the depictions of U.S. statesmen on our currency were sentient beings? “Oh, God, I’ve been smothered in there for an eternity! At last, I can breathe again! Wait … what … are you feeding me into some infernal machine? NO PLEASE I BEG OF YOU NOOMMMphhh”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/13

I feel like I’m not lavishing as much attention on the story of the Party House With A Heart Of Gold and the Possibly Suicidal Cancer-Stricken Stripper in Rex Morgan as I should, but it turns out that tales of uninsured possibly suicidal cancer-stricken people are … actually kind of depressing? Still, my heart is buoyed by Rex’s palpable scheming in panel three. A magical pregnancy-predicting cancer-stricken stripper, eh? This sounds like something Rex can monetize for his clinic!

Funky Winkerbean, 2/7/13

Speaking of depressing stories about cancer, remember back in 2007 (side note: ugh, I am old) when Lisa was dying of cancer in Funky Winkerbean, and one of the questions was whether Darrin, the son she gave up for adoption, would meet his biological mother before she died, but also Darrin was courting Jessica, and she looked an awful lot like him, there were certain suspicions that they may have shared some biological parentage? Well, that turned out to be not the case, but even though this lady is actually his half-sister, not his stepsister, and is related to him via his adopted parents so there’s no genetic overlap, I still admit to being 100% squicked out that she put her hand on his knee in panel two.

Archie, 2/7/13

As is true for a lot of everyman viewpoint characters, Archie’s personality is actually not all that fleshed out, but if I had to describe it I guess I’d say he’s kind of feckless and oversexed. I certainly don’t think of him as being a fanatical athlete of any sort, nor as someone willing to risk exacerbating an injury when he could be hanging out at the ski lodge hitting on girls. Perhaps this is part of his class anxiety vis-a-vis Veronica’s family? Or perhaps the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000, in attempting to parse the human humor genre known as “slapstick,” has decided that if we’ll laugh at the antics of the Three Stooges or Looney Tunes characters, surely we’ll enjoy the thought of a teen boy flying down the slopes, teeth gritted in pain as his tendons tear horribly beyond repair.

Crankshaft, 2/7/13

Speaking of slapstick, some years ago Crankshaft introduced some loathsome yuppie neighbors who were even less likable than the strip’s title character, presumably so we’d laugh when Crankshaft attempted to physically assault them.

Shoe, 2/7/13

THEY’RE BIRDS ALL THESE CHARACTERS ARE BIRDS AND THEY’RE CRACKING WISE ABOUT A COMPANY THAT SLAUGHTERS BIRDS AND PROCESSES THEM INTO FOODSTUFF

THIS IS MONSTROUS BEYOND DESCRIPTION