But first, an update:
No word at this hour on whether Suella Braverman behaved herself at today’s formal Remembrance Day ceremonies in London, though Morten Morland suggests she’s already ruined the weekend.
Reports indicate that some 300,000 people turned out for the latest Saturday march, and there were 126 arrests for violent disruptions and attacks on police.
Not, for the most part, by marchers demanding a cease fire in Gaza, but by the thugs who turned out to oppose them. In other words, Braverman’s fans.
Nice work, Cruella.
On a lighter note
This is admittedly a bit of a spoiler if you haven’t picked up on the current story arc in Between Friends (KFC), which I mentioned earlier and which began here. Maeve is off for a six-month stationing in Paris, and her assistant is supposed to coordinate things while she’s gone, which basically requires doing two jobs for the price of one. One lower-rated job.
I don’t feel bad for Helen. She’s not the one who doesn’t know what she’s going to do about this.
Now on to some more frivolous stuff:
No, no, no, Bizarro (KFS). When they’re being used for children’s art projects, you have to call them “chenille strips.” Calling them “pipe cleaners” would encourage the little moppets to take up a filthy habit.
Though if the kids get too noisy, you can still tell them to “pipe down.” Using the new terminology there would get you into all sorts of trouble.
And speaking of terminology, it’s rather good that Brevity (AMS)‘s pun didn’t summon that other meaning of the term “shag,” or we’d have yet another cartooning controversy on our hands. Though I suppose the fact that nobody raised cain when the Austin Powers movie was advertised means the bluenoses haven’t picked up on it.
More terminology humor in Ali Solomon‘s cartoon. TV critics have dubbed the past few years as the “Golden Age of Television,” which rings false first of all for those of us old enough to remember when Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and other top writers contributed to Playhouse 90 and similar shows, while comedians like Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs were throwing all sorts of creative mud at the wall to see what would stick on the new medium.
Sid Caesar’s writing staff included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner, which matches Casey Stengel’s Yankees roster of the same period, which included Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Bobby Richardson and Phil Rizzuto.
My personal half of the gripe is related to friend-of-the-blog Brian Fies‘s observation that, while Star Trek was fashioned on Gene Roddenberry’s experience in the Navy, subsequent versions of the show were fashioned first on the original and then on the latest variation. Like the audio mix-tapes we used to duplicate for our friends, each subsequent copy lost a little fidelity.
It’s not just Star Trek: The current crop of cop shows and spy movies are based, not on police or intelligence work, but on other cop and spy productions. What you’re seeing is Hollywood’s version of Hollywood’s version of Hollywood’s version.
Joseph Wambaugh and Ian Fleming knew how the stuff worked because they had lived it. Current writers know how it’s expected to look, a dozen generations down the mass-production line.
Yes, there’s some good stuff out there now. But the fact that streamers let you use the F-word doesn’t turn it all to gold.
Okay, enough heavy thoughts. Cornered (AMS) made me giggle with this wonderfully silly visual gag.
I have nothing more to add, except to observe that everyone in Cornered wears glasses, even if they have to fit them over their pantyhose masks.
And another one that needs no commentary. In fact, Jonesy didn’t even need a caption. To turn this from stealing into fair use, I’m supposed to add some kind of critical analysis, so I’m critically analyzing the fact that, as with Cornered, this doesn’t require any.
By contrast, today’s Crabgrass (AMS) could spark all sorts of analysis. The glitch is that, in the old puzzle upon which it is based, you’re supposed to already know that one person always lies and one person always tells the truth.
No, I don’t know how. It doesn’t say. But Kevin would ask.
Tauhid Bondia assumes some cultural literacy on the part of his audience, but he also plays with a kid-level insistence on taking light-hearted hypotheticals seriously.
The benefit of “dad jokes” is that they teach kids to escape the concreteness of their young minds and learn to indulge in the kind of split-logic that makes puns and other foolishness work.
In this case, Miles may have slightly bollixed the set-up, but the real problem is that Kevin can’t get past a stone-clad approach in order to simply enjoy taking the logical challenge. He immediately overthinks the problem and drags Miles into trying to explain things that don’t exist in that imaginary universe.
I say this as someone who, on a road trip from Colorado to New York, made the mistake of asking a five-year-old why carpenters don’t believe in stone*, and then had to spend about 300 miles trying get him to understand the punchline before finally ordering him to drop the subject.
*Because they never saw it.
First Dog on the Moon randomly alternates between political and environmental screeds and episodes of just plain funny stuff, this being an example of the latter.
He’s quite correct that stories of lost sheep with massive, unshorn fleeces turn up on the news with regularity. I don’t think you can quite call them “feral” because they seem more pathetic and confused than determined to live free. The entire concept of a “lost sheep” is so universal that JC was able to weave it into a parable or two without having to explain that, yes, indeed, sheep do wander off rather than escape.
In this case, First Dog has the advantage of an audience who, by history and culture if not experience, knows about sheep and shearing, but, for Yanks, between the accents and the technical jargon, it can be incomprehensible.
(If you clicked that last one, try clicking this one.)
Never mind all that. We’re just lucky to be living in the Golden Age of Sheep.
The version of the one liar one truth-teller tale I came across yesterday had a member of the questing party killing one and asking the survivor whether the deceased were dead.
Speaking of puns, here’s a nice round of applause for today’s “Dark Side of the Horse.”
Indeed. And he gets a decent joke into his topper, too.
https://www.gocomics.com/darksideofthehorse?ct=v&cti=73371
Minor quibble: Larry Gelbart. Great compilation today.
Fixed, thanks
The Lachlan Tigers song, the definition, lyrics, and the sheep animation all made watching the Patriots game this morning far more enjoyable! (There’s 8 minutes left, there’s always hope.) And nothing like a good pipe cleaner joke!
Thank you!
i’m surprised no one mentioned that Caesar’s overall golden all-star line-up occurred over a ten-year period and three separate series and that some of those guys never even met each other. And that, oh yeah, some of today’s TV series (not all, mind you,) do at least employ recent employees in the various fields they’re writing about to at least get the flavor of the vocations they’re portraying, and you can usually tell which ones they are. But then, like Roddenberry, in order to keep getting further jobs in the industry they need to come up with new series in another genre that they weren’t fired from or resigned from.
“He immediately overthinks the problem and drags Miles into trying to explain things that don’t exist in that imaginary universe.”
So pretty much every fandom that has ever existed.
Last I heard, The Shag remains South Carolina’s state dance. One where you stand up, move your feet, and hold your partner’s hand. Oh, and listen to non-locals snickering.
What I remember most about the truth/lie riddle is being quite excited when I first heard it as a kid. So, I told one of the sweet old ladies at church and, when she asked what the answer was, realizing I did not remember. That poor lady.
Gene Roddenberry wasn’t in the Navy, he was in the Army Air Force. And, while his experiences may have informed Star Trek in various ways, he always insisted that “Starfleet is not a military organization” (in fact, this was one of his criticisms of Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek movies).
That said, the point about a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy is certainly valid (although whenever a new Star Trek show comes out, fans inevitably criticize it for not being sufficiently similar to previous Star Trek shows).
Of course, none of the “classic” tv Westerns were made by actual cowboys. Otherwise, they would have included much more large animal husbandry.
I guess I’m a dirty old lady. The first thing that came to my head was not hairstyles.
Trying to make sense of the cartoon, I initially considered the idea that the four in front of the judge were a family, two of which were the result of the other two obeying the order.