Steve Kelley on the annual “Boy, Our Kids Are Stupid” scandal, in which we wring our hands over how little our kids know about history and then go back to talking about the important topics of the day. This year, it is Anthony Weiner’s weiner, which continues to resonate throughout the media.(In the news cycle, […]
Joe Martin’s Mr. Boffo is one of several cartoons he does, each a different expression of a very funny world view combined with a talent for build-ups to punchlines like this. The unifying principle is the bland assurance that the speaker is perfectly sane and normal. Even when it’s predictable, it’s funny.And I’ll admit I […]
As KAL notes, the campaign has started.I moved to New Hampshire so late in October, 2008, that, before I left Maine, I voted there by proxy, since I didn’t know any of the local issues in my new home-to-be. I wasn’t in the Granite State long enough to get new plates for the car […]
(Dealing with a computer crash. In lieu of a new cartoon, please enjoy this article and a contemporaneous cartoon on the same topic. Apparently, it’s always been hard to monetize a medium once it has become established as a playground for geeks.)Sarnoff says public will not pay for radio programs(December 28, 1923)With the general trend […]
You can tell the family in “Baby Blues” lives in a newer neighborhood. This is part of an ongoing story arc in which Hammie severs the cable while digging in the yard. If it were set here, he’d have to have been, I dunno, playing with a chain saw or something. And taking down a […]
Okay, Sarah Laing’s Let Me Be Frank is now officially on the list of Comics I Have To Avoid Citing All The Time. (And you have to click on that link, because this is only the first of three panels.) I can’t resist the way she combines simple art with a voice that I would call […]
If you’re not already following Prickly City, this might be a good time to start. The election of Kevin, the Lost Bunny of the Apocalypse, to the US Senate has produced some good laughs and the prospect of his making a run for the presidency is promising.For a number of years, the answer to “Aren’t […]
No kidding.Darrin Bell recently did some right-to-the-edge deadline work on the death of bin Laden, and he’s done it again in today’s Candorville. But, even getting his lead time down to a minimum, he had to time the strip to hit when the laughter was over, but before the coverage let up.One can only hope […]
Mark Parisi shared this creative use of an “Off the Mark” panel on his Facebook page. The Spanish teacher deleted the original caption — “I give it three months.” — and asked her students to fill in a new joke, and gave this one — “That man needs to shave.” — the highest grade for using […]
Bud Grace is capable of setting up seemingly significant plot shifts in Piranha Club and then blowing them away with a simple flick of the reset button — often starring himself. And that may still be in the offing.But it’s starting to look like Ernie is really headed down the aisle, and not a moment […]
Keith Knight’s “Knight Life” offers up one of those jokes that is absolutely, completely stupid but that, once you’ve heard it, becomes permanently embedded in your brain.From this moment on, every time anybody mentions GPS, I’m going to think about some daffy driver going the wrong way because she thinks she’s got an Sd9.Thanks, Keef. […]
Pat Oliphant on priorities.After the discussion the other day about political courage versus partisan hackery, it occurred to me that one reason we’ve been in Afghanistan so much longer than we were in Vietnam is that nobody in the major parties wants to stand up and ask the sorts of questions raised by Oliphant’s cartoon. […]
The nice thing about a single-panel strip like “Rubes” is that, when Leigh Rubin gives in to the temptation to do a really stupid pun, he doesn’t have any space to tread on it by having characters “react.”I can’t tell you how many times I reject a strip for CSOTD because the cartoonist dulled a […]
Cory Thomas’s “Watch Your Head” continues to be one of the most underappreciated and most interesting of syndicated strips.It’s always risky to do gags that require the reader to know the characters and moreso when the characters change. The gang at Oliver Otis University are in constant flux, which — while a rarity in comic […]
Pat Bagley on how far we’ve fallen in four decades.There was a time when political leaders thought about their positions on various issues. They certainly weren’t immune to the concept of party loyalty, but neither were they slaves to it. We could justifiably point to Congress and say we preferred our system to Parliamentary democracy, […]