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179

Sitcom-adjacent jokes

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/20/25

On Sunday, June got the mail, and told her sons that the family had gotten a wedding invite, and they were like “You get free cake at a wedding! That’s the reward for sitting through the boring parts!” Then yesterday and today, she also told Rex about the invite, and he gave the exact same response. This would’ve been a perfectly serviceable bit if it had played out over a minute or so in a sitcom, but it works significantly less well in a continuity strip, where it takes three days and at the end you have to remind people what happened over the previous two days, in case they never read those strips, or just forgot about them.

Luann, 5/20/25

“Sassy old lady” is also a hoary sitcom trope, and I probably shouldn’t get as much amusement from it as I do, but you have to admit it works particularly well in Luann, when the sassy old lady quips are generally along the lines of “Hey why don’t you loser kids shut the fuck up for once in your extremely overthought lives, huh? Let’s have some tea.”

Crankshaft, 5/20/25

Look, buddy, this lady works at a florist shop, so I agree that she should not just repeat the name of the flower you named back at you as a question, but should rather let you know if they have them available and how much they would cost if they do. However, I do not think taking her question as an opportunity to launch into a meandering soliloquy about times gone by is going to speed up this transaction. Quite the opposite, in fact!

147

Crime and/or punishment

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/19/25

I really appreciate how chill Hagar is about his own prosecution here. Based on the wigs, he’s probably being tried for his crimes in England, which was particularly powerless to stop Viking raids during this period, so presumably he’s sticking around out of curiosity to see what the verdict will be before his warrior band overwhelms the inadequate local Saxon levies and frees him by killing everyone in the courtroom.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/19/25

Snuffy Smith has been doing a storyline where Barney Google has reappeared and is practicing law with no more legal training than his big city smarts, and apparently he’s winning case after case. This just goes to show the importance of an adversarial legal system: after decades of townsfolk being forced to appear in court without any legal representation, the town’s law enforcement community has lost all ability to make even the basic arguments necessary to convict obvious lawbreakers like Snuffy Smith.

Hi and Lois, 5/19/25

Look at the big smiles on Hi and Lois’s faces! They’re positively giddy at the prospect of watching 2024’s feel-good Oscar fare like Anora and The Brutalist. C’mon, Chip, join in on the fun!

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Bleak Sunday

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Shoe, 5/18/25

You know I’m a fan of the depressing Shoe strips where either the Perfesser or Skyler is sitting in the living room chair and the other one has to just stand there awkwardly in order to have a conversation because they don’t have a second living room chair and have no plans to get one. A nice touch about these strips is that often, as in today’s, the person sitting in the chair has to uncomfortably crane their neck around to talk, just to emphasize that the house layout is incredibly hostile to the very idea of the two people living there interacting with one another for more than the briefest stretches of time.

Dick Tracy, 5/18/25

“…111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603! That’s the Art Institute of Chicago, which bought the painting from Grant Wood directly after it took a bronze medal in a competition there. It was lent to a couple European museums in the mid ’10s but it’s back now. Anyway, not sure why Dick Tracy needs to get this information over the phone from a real cagey guy who probably just murdered someone instead of looking it up online like a normal person, but I don’t tell him how to do his business.”

Panel from The Lockhorns, 5/18/25

This is about … Loretta dying, right? Like definitely Leroy is musing, right in the middle of their therapy session, about how great it would be for him personally if Loretta died?