CSotD: Friday Short Takes
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Amid a host of responses to The Grand Presidential Pivot, Jimmy Margulies focuses on the question I'm asking: Where is the love you said was mine, all mine, 'til the end of time?
Talk about buyer's remorse! Poor Vovochka must surely be awakening to that "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up" realization.
Maybe he sees it as just a bad investment, but it's not like the heat is going to come off Trump at this end, and so, whatever the actual loss of investment may be, Putin's also very likely to be put through the humiliation of having the futility of his manipulations revealed publicly.
I don't think former KGB types are used to that.
Poor baby.
Betty makes life interesting today for parents who read the comics aloud to their kids.
I like plausible deniability and, in this case, the most plausible denial is this: If the kid says he doesn't get it, you say you don't get it, either.
And that you snorted because your sinuses are acting up from the springtime pollen, just like the fellow in the Pat Byrnes/New Yorker cartoon.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Brevity)
As I've said before, the best part of dropping puns into single-panel cartoons is that you don't have to add any response.
Despite requiring a certain level of cultural literacy — good luck explaining these to your kid — these are still both really dumb and that's okay because dumb jokes are funny if you don't overplay them.
Having a character in a three-panel strip explain that he wants a tattoo that says "Born Toulouse" and having the tattoo artist say "Coming right up, Monsieur Lautrec" would turn dumb into stupid.
Particularly since, once you are forced to acknowledge that the gag takes place in France, you also have to acknowledge that the pun only works in English.
And I'll shut up now because analyzing why it works also kills it. But it works.
And the second one also works for me today because it brings up Bogey and provides a reasonable lead-in to another Hollywood-connected rant, though closer to his role in "Key Largo" than "Casablanca" and fergodsake don't click on that link.
I hope it's not too big a violation of the Prime Directive for me to be snarky about a comic from a half century ago that was not done by the original creator, because today's (Nov 29, 1957) Rip Kirby makes me think we need to start a non-profit to protect bad girls with hearts of gold, who always seem to take a bullet for the good guy at the end.
The positive spin on today's strip would be to simply wish aloud that Comics Kingdom would restart the Vintage run from the beginning in 1946, when Alex Raymond was at the helm, and not just dribble out its entropy after his death a decade later.
And it would also be positive to note that, even in its decline, it was a damn sight better than a lot of other strips, then and now.
I could also hope that, tomorrow, we'll learn that Sirene is only wounded and that she and James will ride off into the sunset, but somehow those shopworn angels always manage to catch the bullet somewhere fatal.
Okay, okay, disclosure: Destry Rides Again is one of my favorite movies and I even named a dog "Destry," but I still wish he'd had a chance to marry Frenchy instead of that limp, virtuous dishrag Janice Tyndall. I know that the little girl at the end is supposed to reassure us that there will always be a Frenchy, but it's cold comfort when you've settled for life with a good girl.
In his place, I'd have rather taken Kent's bullet.
Destry: Don't let me interfere with your dinner, ma'am.
Frenchy: It's breakfast.
That's my kind of girl: Someone totally unapologetic, with the guts to invent her own past by defiantly adopting a name that her accent betrays as an outrageous falsehood.
They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
— Jack Kerouac, but you knew that
(She had three songs in "Destry." This is not the most famous, but it's my favorite.)
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