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Folks, here it is: your comment of the week!

“OK men, welcome to our daily socially-distanced, FaceTime happy hour! You know the drill: Get those thermometers out and let’s all take our temperature together. What do you mean you don’t get why we’re doing this, since it’s April 2020 and everything in Ohio is completely locked down and nobody can meet anywhere, and even if we had a fever no covid-19 test kits are available and there’s little to nothing you can do with that information? This is totally something normal that straight, elderly men do together during a pandemic. Now shove any thermometer you have lying around into an orifice and make sure it’s on camera.” –Carsick Yankee

Your runners up are also very funny!

“At least it’s not a burglar. A mere raccoon is going to find itself part of a giant sandwich in the morning.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“I like that Dagwood doesn’t have the energy to close that front door, but he absolutely has the energy to change into his signature pajamas. No sleeping in his underwear for this guy!” –Joe Blevins

“In the first panel the cop is trying to hold in a fart, and in the third he’s pretending he wasn’t responsible for it.” –nescio

“Batiuk working thirteen months ago, thinking, ‘I mean obviously this’ll all be over by April 2021’ is by far the most oppressively upsetting thing ever to come out of a Funkyverse comic, and he didn’t even mean to do it. His masterpiece, and it was a total accident. Amazing.” –Dan

“I can’t wait to bathe in Dick Tracy’s take on Goth culture. Truly can’t wait. I’m sure it’ll be perceptive and timely and in no way solely based on the time his son made him listen to the Cure’s Pornography on a road trip back in ’83.” –toxic

“Interesting how NeoChicago can simultaneously violate prisoner’s rights while endangering corrections officers. One officer on a prisoner transfer? Do you want violent escapes, prolonged manhunts, and climactic gun battles in which the escapee goes down in a welter of blood and gore? Because that’s how you get violent … what’s that? You do want that? Oh. Well, carry on, NCPD.” –Voshkod

“The main message I’m getting here is that no one in Crankshaft’s actual family, who he lives with, cares if he’s sick or not.” –Mr. A

“I know a little about fundraising! First, you discover a product which has a very high mark-up and then send out unpaid schoolchildren to go door-to-door coercing grown-ups into buying it based on their familial connections or relationship to the school or the nostalgia of adults for their own youthful aspirations. The only thing we’re missing from that formula is everything.” –But What Do I Know?

“For all you women who think you can treat Crankshaft like a piece of meat — apparently that’s how he sees himself, so continue!” –jenna

“I read Dustin and was like, ‘OK, those two and the offscreen child, where’s the joke?’ I am proud that I have not been Stockholm-Syndromed into learning how many children the Dustins have or assuming that there will be a joke.” –matt w

“I don’t know whether Drew should be dissatisfied with his life, but Jeff definitely should be dissatisfied with his nose job.” –seismic-2

“There’s a common trope in Japanese manga about love budding when someone forgets an umbrella and their potential partner fetching one to protect them from the elements. The Family Circus is now extremely stupid yaoi romance, is what I’m saying, I will brook no deviation from newly-established canon.” –pastordan

“What the fuck is on Chip’s head? I know these strips are written by impossibly old men who understand golf and nothing else, but you’d think one of them would have seen a hat before.” –Rosstifer

“Speaking of facial expressions, I’m always fascinated by the ones sported by ancillary characters in the Lockhorns. Look at this woman, for example: I have no idea what she’s doing here but she has clearly dissociated completely from her body, hopefully with the help of some powerful drugs.” –pugfuggly

“You’re a plugger if you qualify for the rarely-claimed refundable cross-species marital credit.” –Lawyerbob

“Leroy wanted to see how his dream would turn out, his dream of lying motionless in a featureless void while an endless parade of women marches past, each commenting on the futility of that very dream. That’s when he swore he would never again sneak some of Loretta’s medication.” –grsblvnyk

“Hi is still bitter that the Monkees broke up. Wait, he’s how old in 2021? Yikes… Hi is still bitter that Chumbawamba broke up.” –BigTed

“‘Drew will find his way. They usually do.’ ‘I hope you’re right, Mary, but I have yet to see any peer-reviewed longitudinal studies demonstrating that Drews usually do!’” –Effluvius Erratus

“Hi has always seemed like kind of a dick, in all honesty, but he more and more seems like a clinically depressed dick.” –Rube

“‘You can’t have a tattoo!’ ‘Because it’s permanent?’ ‘No, quite the opposite. Because of our negative continuity, no change can last beyond the last panel and by the next day the status quo will have been entirely restored.’ ‘That’s soul-crushing!’ ‘Yes, but we’ll forget it by the end of the strip.’” –Ettorre

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Mary Worth, 4/16/21

Oh, now we’re getting to what Dr. Jeff really means when he says Dr. Drew seems “dissatisfied with life” even though he hasn’t actually expressed any dissatisfaction: he’s not safely paired up in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, the way his happily married sister Adrian is. You remember Adrian, right? She used to occasionally get the romantic sad-sack storylines to take some of the burden off Dawn once in a while. She was engaged to a con artist at one point, then was in love with a cop but couldn’t commit to loving him until he was gunned down during a drug raid, so she agreed to marry him on what she assumed was his death bed, but he survived so she had to go through with it. Later, her bitter man-hating best friend Jill pulled out all the stops to ruin their wedding until Mary fixed her emotional problems. And then we really haven’t heard much from Adrian since! Maybe the reason Dr. Drew isn’t so eager to be married is that he knows that means banishment to a drama-free life, which in turn means he’ll never take center stage in this strip again. Or maybe it’s the endless casual sexual possibilities currently open to him as a handsome young doctor, who can say.

Hi and Lois, 4/16/21

Anyway, marriage leads to parenthood and parenthood leads to disillusionment and disillusionment leads to telling your kid, who still thinks that love and beauty are possible and enduring, that vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

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Family Circus, 4/15/21

Many years ago, I was going through customs at Boston Airport, and one of the customs inspectors had an extremely cute beagle on a leash wearing a vest that said “I’M PROTECTING AMERICA’S AGRICULTURE!” This dog was sniffing around everyone’s bags, and he came up to a family with a little boy who had a soft-sided lunch box that was open, and the dog stuck his head into it to sniff around a bit. The boy squealed indignantly “That dog licked my lunch box!” and the dog’s handler replied, in a clipped and measured tone that I will never forget, “That dog’s mouth is cleaner than yours.”

Anyway, I immediately thought about this when I saw Barfy’s aggrieved face here. “Can you believe this shit?” he’s definitely thinking. “Have you seen the things this child has done with those hands? I came over here to eat food that had fallen on the floor, not to be slandered like this.”

The Lockhorns, 4/15/21

Speaking of Jeffy’s bullshit, you could definitely see a panel where one of the Keane kids, grinning in bed like a dope, declares, “I can’t wait to see how last night’s dream turned out!”, right? Amazing how that kind of sappy line can be instantly changed to a cutting Lockhorns put-down just by changing the speaker.

Pluggers, 4/15/21

This year’s tax filing deadline was extended to May 17, so I guess you’re a plugger if you have your tax day comic all ready to go for April 15 and you’re not gonna let big government tell you to change it! Also, it seems that you’re a plugger if you do your taxes by dutifully researching potential deductions you can legally take (this is how everyone else does their taxes, too).