CSotD: Christmas with all the trimming
Skip to comments
Start with the dumbest joke of the day and work your way up, that's my motto. Today's Argyle Sweater is really dumb, but it's seasonally dumb, which adds a certain Jenny C. Kwan.
I remember Christmas cards where the front was the alphabet, or appeared to be, but when you opened it, it said, "No L," and then you closed it and looked again, and, yep, there wasn't.
This reverses the gag: You spot the misspelling and then the caption explains it. Much less work for the reader, plus a nice little nyah-nyah-nyah for the people who were priding themselves on their superior spelling skills.
Speaking of which, or even of whom:
A friend from the dogpark posted this on my Facebook page. I guess my contempt for grammar nazis isn't much of a secret.
It not only made me laff, but, when I traced it back for proper attribution, I discovered that the venerable "Funny But No" site, which I thought Shoebox had quietly deep-sixed many years ago, it's still around, or back, or something.
This is how all this re-posting of gags is supposed to work: I go back to the original site and find that there is a lot of other stuff there and so my wasting of time increases in volume but improves in quality.
As someone who starts every morning re-posting other people's cartoons, I kind of bank on that, though Facebook doesn't provide a lot of hope.
Case in point. This xkcd is brilliant, but mostly because of the central futility of it all.
Yes, sites like Buzzfeed exist simply to lure people in with empty promises, urban legends and outright BS, sometimes simply to gain clicks, sometimes to harvest addresses for spammers. And if you are still clicking on anything that comes with these phrases, you are one step away on the gullibility scale from sending your life savings to a Nigerian widow.
A few days ago, I set up a new Facebook page in order to separate my personal friends from my cartooning friends, something I should have done in the first place. It's been instructive, beginning with the fact that migrating the cartoonists and comics fans over to the new page didn't make nearly as big a dent in the glut at my original page as I had hoped.
So I'm getting out the trimmers and, while I will always (sigh) indulge personal friends who can't tell spam-traps from sites of actual interest, the ones who absolutely cannot be lectured into occasionally checking Snopes before reposting nonsense are apt to be at least hidden if not unfriended completely.
But I've also decided not to be so indulgent of people who don't believe Fred Phelps' religious views entitle him to picket military funerals but become indignant when Phil Robertson is criticized for his homophobic religious views and his claims that the happy,singing darkies of his childhood didn't need or particularly want civil rights.
In other words, I'm dealing with foolish and gullible on a case-by-case basis, but hateful is getting the axe.
Should have been the policy all along, but I do have Christmas memories of huddling with my father in the livingroom to watch David Susskind with the sound turned down so that a much-loved aunt in the next room wouldn't hear it and wander in to share her thoughts.
But you know what, folks? That was a long time ago and you're not my aunt.
Doesn't mean there isn't humor in all this: Today's Reply All is a delightfully wry commentary on people who obsess needlessly over how to be inclusively sensitive.
But there's a helluva difference between being needlessly polite and being needlessly hateful and rude. The first is potentially funny, the second is not.
Especially when divisive hatred is based on a lie. There is no "war on Christmas," there is no ban on wishing people a Merry Christmas and public schools still celebrate the day.
As for Santa and Jesus's whiteness being "history," spare me. I got your history right here, pal.
Christmas is Christmas, fer christ's sake.
It's so simple, a child can figure it out.
Need a little more?
Tom Spurgeon pointed out this terrific collection of Yuletide gems from the past. Actually, he was pointing out the Mad Magazine retelling of "A Christmas Carol" by Harvey Kurtzman and David Levine, but, as with the Shoebox site above, there's a whole lot more really cool stuff on the site, including a collection of Gahan Wilson Christmas cartoons.
By the way, I'm loosening yesterday's blanket condemnation of "Santa got stuck in the chimney" gags, though perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule.
And here's a present: Lost Side of Suburbia, which had gone on hiatus while Cory Merritt worked on some other stuff, is back at GoComics. He's come back to wrap up a long segment, so it's probably not a good time for newcomers to jump in, but if you were wondering how it came out, here's your chance, and I assume a new story will be starting soon.
Cory quit production while he worked on a major project, which is good news because he is a young cartoonist who deserves to do well. And, since he has on-line books, you can even help him out with a little last minute Christmas shopping.
And, by the way, Liza Donnelly also has a collection of her New Yorker and other cartoons available in electronic or non-electronic form.
And, if you celebrate 12th Night, you could even order the new Lola collection or any of the books in the Amazon widget at the right or in the self-publishers' link which ditto, and the books will arrive before the Three Kings do.
Comments 6
Comments are closed.