CSotD: Please don’t all be funny at once
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I hate Wednesday. Never mind Monday, though I do enjoy a nice plate of lasagna now and again.
But Wednesdays are the worst day of the week, an embarrassment of riches with which I cannot cope.
On Monday, cartoonists are introducing new arcs and the set up is not always a good stand-alone. Friday can be a payoff strip, but sometimes the payoff simply consists of resolving a problem that has been hilarious all week.
And Saturday, which is the lowest day for readership, thus becomes where you stash the ones you kind of know weren't perhaps your best.
Those are days of desperation. But sometimes desperation is better than surfeit.
Wednesday is the heart of the week, the high point of the arc and, even when there is no arc, it seems that the third cartoon hits during the blissed-out period in some kind of cartooning endorphin rush.
Leaving me with way too many funny strips to sort through and a real problem making cuts.
For instance, in Retail today, newly-minted store manager Marla and not-her-choice assistant Josh are going through applications:
Even in a good economy, this would be funny to anyone who has ever worked in a mall. But at the moment? There are desperate applicants out there who wish someone in the real world would bring Marla's refreshing honesty to the process.
And I don't know if this really counts as a "Wednesday" cartoon, since Nemi panels are backed way up waiting for translation and not all of them make it into English. But that latter aspect alone means I could have riffed on this one for miles, first because I'd love to know how it read in Scandanavian, and then I could have gone on based on the fact that I edit the work of middle schoolers.
By the way, there is no way to stop middle school kids, even the brilliant ones I work with, from writing like middle school kids. Nor would I want to. But I do show them this at our workshops (to absolutely no avail):
Meanwhile, over at Between Friends, Susan has decided that the key to getting control of the house is to do one small task every day instead of trying to tackle the whole thing at once. And it started off well enough. But, predictably, here's where we are now:
Wasn't sure how to deal with this one anyway. You have to read the full arc to get a sense of how the Patron Saint of Good Intentions has sunk from a great start to self-deception to full complacency, and one strip wasn't going to do it.
But it would have been a chance to talk about the difference between "predictable" in the bad sense and knowing how something is going to come out.
We know Susan won't follow through. But that's a large part of the fun. We also know that Ralph Kramden's get-rich-quick scheme isn't going to work, Beaver's gonna get caught and that Rhoda Morgenstern will never find a husband.
Until she does and the whole show goes right into the tank. Which only goes to show the impact of conceptual drift.
It would have been a really good rant.
A rant based on this Tony Auth cartoon, however, would have been totally epic. Awesome, even:
Turns out that Mitt was joking the other day when he wondered aloud about opening the windows on jet aircraft, and the fault appears to be in the use of a "pool reporter" who faithfully passed along the quotes without adding any 😉 emoticons.
However, he did say poor people could go to emergency rooms for care, though he apparently feels they should have no medical care at all until they have a heart attack. This approach to medicine is so wasteful, expensive and counter-productive on every possible level that recommending it is easily as dumb as actually thinking they should let you open the windows on a 747.
Especially when you're on record as saying it's a dumb idea. Several times.
Thing is, you want to lay the groundwork such that, if someone hears that you said the windows on jets should open, their immediate reaction is, "I'm sure he was kidding" and not "there he goes again."
Doesn't matter. I'm voting for the UPS delivery guy in today's Mr. Boffo. He's got cute knees.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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