CSotD: Hump Day Revisited
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It’s getting really hard to avoid politics on Hump Day, but, then again, everything Roz Chast does is political in the wider, sociopolitical sense. It’s generally true anyway, because even a Three Stooges pie fight is based on working class hatred of the wealthy and privileged.
There’s a kind of John Oliver/Jimmy Kimmel penetrative insight going on here. Chast is rarely this direct but she’s often this insightful, and you should never doubt that a good comedian has plenty of solid insights into what’s going on.
I often have to decide whether to feature Banx on political days or save him for Hump Day. What I particularly like about this piece is that he doesn’t specify who they’re talking about, which makes the gag funnier because we fill in the name ourselves.
And it wouldn’t be nearly so funny if she said he wanted the prize in chemistry or medicine, given the bombastic, semi-literate tone of his Truth posts and the fact that he doesn’t read his briefing papers, much less any books.
There was a comedian named Jackie Vernon a generation or so ago whose schtick was to say ridiculous things without a trace of a smile or any emotion at all. It’s not a gift; it’s a craft. Banx reminds me a bit of him because he makes you do all the heavy lifting and that increases the humor.
Lao-tsu famously said that the followers of the best leaders say “We did it ourselves,” and that’s a good way to judge cartoonists and comedians as well.
Noth is a master of semi-political observational humor and here he presents us with the polar opposite of Lao-tsu’s ideal manager. When Jesus made his observation about the lilies of the field, he was declaring the value of everyone, regardless of their status or accomplishments, and saying what a waste of spiritual effort it is to obsess over material things.
The joke, of course, is that this poor blinded bureaucrat can’t see beyond return on investment.
Incidentally, some 400 millionaires and billionaires have sent a letter to the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, declaring that wealth disparity has gotten out of hand and that the wealthy should be paying higher taxes.
Score one for Joseph of Arimathea.
It’s getting hard to believe that Prickly City was introduced as a conservative balance to Doonesbury but one not as foaming-at-the-mouth as Mallard Filmore.
However, Scott Stantis — who is retiring from political cartooning — is a genuine conservative, not just a political one, so today’s strip is consistent with his values as well as with a mellowing of the feature that has been going on for some time.
I’m not sure legalized marijuana needed two billboards here, but gambling does. My initial contact with organized crime was a high-school kid who sold betting slips for his uncle. I bought a slip to be polite, but gambling isn’t my thing and I wasn’t happy with legalized lotteries, much less casinos.
Liquor ads are expected to show moderate consumption, but sports gambling ads are under no such restriction. They’re like the auto ads that show the car going 100 mph with a small disclaimer that says “Professional driver on closed road.” Except their disclaimers are specifically aimed at the already-addicted.
Another case of the news being funny enough that you don’t have to stretch for laughs. It’s true that the college has ordered a professor not to teach portions of the Symposium dealing with sex and gender.
Which I guess means that, if a lit class reads the Iliad, they’ll have to leave out the parts about Achilles and Patroclus, though they might be allowed to read about Achilles and Briseis, since loving another man is evil, but owning a woman for sexual pleasure is heteronormative.
At least it had better be. Screening for adultery and suchlike would pretty much eliminate even having a Literature Department.
The whole issue seems intended to send the Aggies back to just studying agriculture like God intended.
If colleges stop turning out lit majors, who’s going to wait tables and do food prep at restaurants, eh?
And then who will get gags like this? I worked enough restaurant gigs to have seen the health inspectors come through and what a shame that we didn’t just offer them a few drinks and skip the part where they warned us not to let rodents run around in the storage room.
Anyway, here’s a cartoon that has nothing to do with politics, assuming that Wayno and Piraro thought it up before the meeting in Davos and all the Greenland threats.
And assuming that Mark Carney isn’t Batman.
Another one that could have run on a politics day but that made me laugh enough to put it in Hump Day instead. Venables gets two birds with one stone here, because he not only speculates on the madness of King Donald, but depicts his own monarch as padding around in bedroom slippers and a smoking jacket, watering the plants.
At least Charlie has a plan of succession, assuming nobody else gets angry and moves to America or pops up in the Epstein files. King Donald’s plan of succession appears to be not to need one.
Though it could play out like King Lear, where he rages around on the moors, doting on Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, but at the end we learn it was Tiffany who truly loved him all along.
Here’s one that isn’t at all political, which is odd since Harry Burton frequently is. And I suppose it’s another example of politics in a social sense, since artists should deserve at least to live, if not prosper, on the proceeds of their creations, and streaming has certainly disrupted that system.
It’s not exactly new: Doonesbury took it on back in 2002:
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when companies would announce a gigantic scary lawsuit against some kid who downloaded their music, but then they began offering it through Spotify and similar places, which didn’t much help the artists, as this analysis explains.
And so musicians have to hit the road to make a living. While piling up other kinds of debt.
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