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Dustin, 5/25/24

Syndicated newspaper comic strip creators love golf for some accursed reason, but I have to say that they’re generally pretty good about only doing jokes about aspects of golf that non-golfers know about through cultural osmosis, like that you can lose your ball in a sand or water trap, or that everyone who plays it fucking hates it for some reason. Today’s Dustin, however, requires you to know whether 112 is a good or a bad score. I mean, I guess it’s clear from context that it’s bad, but still: I think this is over the line. It made me dedicate some thought to the awful “sport of kings” [note to self: wait, is that horse racing? double-check this] when all I wanted to do is find out what specific kind of terrible asshole Dustin’s dad was going to be today. Unacceptable! Save it for your side gig submitting New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons to Golf Digest, creeps!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/25/24

“Living their retro-diner-roots-country life to the fullest” makes it sound very much like we’re seeing some unpleasant rockabilly LARP situation, possibly in a corporate “immersive experience” theme park run by whatever hedge fund currently owns the rights to the Johnny Rockets IP. And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that this is foreplay!

Family Circus, 5/25/24

Ah, man, this is great. Now I know that whenever we see Billy dressed up to play sports, he feels like he’s under a microscope and is miserable most of the time! I’m a major Billy hater as you all well know, so this is a big win for me.

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Enjoy your weekend in the humorous glow of this week’s top comment!

“Justin is doing his own thing, as always? No. I don’t believe it. Oh, wait … a lava lamp? I stand corrected.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

Your runners up will also bring you a smile, from their funniness!

“Oh, I know why. It’s because Slylock is an adherent of Thomas Nagel’s epistemological skepticism, whose central premise is to doubt the existence of everything, including, but not limited to, Reeky’s proffered alibi. So that one was easy today. I’ll bet all the kids will get it!” –Bob Tice

“What is it about the weird bird world that Shoe takes place in that nobody can have a straight conversation? It must be hellish to live in a society where even the most basic of questions is met with either a stupid pun or a sarcastic jab.” –ectojazzmage

“So intrigued by whether the fish is the friend or the fish is the bed.” –LLM Cool J, on Twitter

“Wilbur has two paths to go from here. On the first, he processes this lesson about the impermanence of relationships and learns to let his attachment to Iris go, having achieved true inner peace. On the second he gets even weirder and, I dunno, marries his other fish.” –Dan

“What’s funny about that punchline is that it’s so overwrought Dustin’s dad must have been working on that for a solid week. I’d tell him not to quit his day job but it looks as though he hates that too.” –pugfuggly

“I’ve lost a couple of pets in my time, and one thing I never did was collapse against the fridge sobbing out urban legends about Walt Disney’s corpse.” –Schroduck

Leave it there … I can’t come to the door right now! I’m using the bathroom! Oh, wait … I’m not in the bathroom, am I…?” –Charterstoned

“Say, did you know the ‘cola wars’ are considered to be an ongoing thing? That puts an Orwellian spin on today’s strip. (‘We have always been at war with Keurig Dr. Pepper…’)” –TheDiva

“Trixie is waging a war against the Mainstream Media, which is libelling her friend, the sun, saying it causes skin cancer.” –Ettorre

“Those snails are in the desert because that’s where you find the mutating radiation that has clearly turned them into oversized monsters, as 1950s science fiction movies always told us it would. I mean, look at those flowers: half the height of a flatscreen TV, and the snails dwarf them. The snails are huge. Fear the snails of Yucca Mountain.” –Vice President John Adams

“It’s just a silly comic, but I’m going to be spending the rest of my day wondering if snails are either so technologically advanced that they have televisions that work with no apparent power or signal/streaming sources, or so gullible that you can fool them into thinking they have a television by slapping a simple drawing onto a stand.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“So Justin’s evolved his pineal gland into a working third eye. Good for him; ain’t Theosophy great? Or at least peaceful and, these days, mostly extinct. I suppose he could have joined Aum Shinrikyo or Heaven’s Gate or the Unification Church or any other organization filled with crazed loons who have ambitious goals to rule or kill, but no, this is Rex Morgan, the ‘no soap, no opera’ of soap opera strips.” –Voshkod

“Goddammit, kid, it’s 5 of 6:00. I just got home from a long sweaty day perfecting the delivery system for Napalm, and I just want a drink. It is far too late in the day for ontology!” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“He’s not being that good. He’s wearing his shoes while on the furniture, for one.” –taig

“When he was in prison for burglary, Malcom X became a voracious reader and would use the knowledge gained and his newfound faith to become one of the most influential civil rights leaders of the 20th Century. Dennis, however, has just become more and more spiteful. Literacy will be the first thing to go when he attains power.” –Philip

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Between Friends, 5/24/24

For my sins, I must occasionally fulfill my oath and keep you up to date on the Between Friends gals, so: the dark-haired Between Friends gal is working temporarily in Paris, and has a flirty relationship with her boss Benoit and a weirdly antagonistic relationship with her coworker Louise, and today we’re finding out why. I bring all this up because, maybe I’m crazy, but I find the phrasing in panel two here very weird? Like: do I think your wife’s sister’s daughter is your niece? Absolutely. Would I still call her your niece if you and your wife got divorced? More of a grey area, but I still think of my dad’s brother’s ex-wife, who I’m friends with on Facebook, as my aunt, and they’ve been divorced for 20 years, so it’s not unreasonable. But the formulation “his niece on his ex-wife’s side!” just seems deranged and unnatural to me. Do we have nieces and nephews on … sides? I am imagining her co-worker here saying it in a really heavy French accent and then explaining what he thinks it means. “‘Niece’ is what you say in English for a woman you’re sleeping with who isn’t your wife, non? And ‘on your wife’s side’ means your wife knows about it? My English is, how you say, not so good.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/24

I honestly love the vibe Dennis is giving off here. He genuinely is being good, just calmly sitting on the chair and reading a book, like he’s been doing for the last three days, and it sucks! It sucks ass and he hates it! He’s doing it because he has to but he will never like it.