(The CIDU and Oy lists are compiled and stored completely separately from one another, and I didn’t notice until just now what was queued up for Monday morning)
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Comics I Don't Understand 
She’s married and not a country girl. She shouldn’t have been on farmersonly.com.
But if you ignore that, I suddenly think that he was going for The Enigmatic Smile meeting The Not-quite Frown.
The Mona Lisa was painted on wood. American Gothic was painted by Wood. So…
No, I got nothing.
I think this joke is only half there. There is a dating site called farmersonly.com and I think he thought it’d be funny if the iconic farmer from American Gothic used the dating site. I think that that is *all* Mike Peters was going for. But he had to come up with who was he dating. And he figured another painting but couldn’t think of a painting with a woman farmer (I be we will think of several) so he just went with a well known painting. And what painting is more well known than the Mona Lisa?
So basically he started the joke but missed the putt.
“But if you ignore that, I suddenly think that he was going for The Enigmatic Smile meeting The Not-quite Frown.”
I think that’s good but I don’t think Mike Peters was good enough to think of that.
Perhaps part of the idea was that it would be a surprise to have a conservative American farmer hook up with a cosmopolitan European lady. One would think he would have stayed closer to home, but I just checked, and Whistler’s Mother is in France.
I thought Whistler’s Mother was in Mr Bean’s apartment.
The implication being that dating sites mismatch people.
The farmer in “American Gothic” doesn’t belong with “Mona Lisa, ” so there’s the example that just happened to occur to the cartoonist at the moment.
a painting with a woman farmer (I be we will think of several)
The woman in Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” is probably not a working farmer, but she seems to live in something like a farmhouse set in large fields.
(I be[t] we will think of several)
Apart from Millet, nothing comes to my mind.
Millet’s “The Gleaners” was my first thought also, but I guess the guy from “American Gothic” was told that the farmersonly dating site did not approve of polyamory and thus would *not* match him up with three ladies at once. Which is probably why he’s always frowning.
You can tell from the body language that neither is happy with this pairing. If they were, she’d either be flipped horizontally, or sitting on his other side, facing him (either way).
“She’s married”
By now, she must have been widowed, no?
From a bit of googling one can come up with https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Julien_Dupre_-_La_Recolte_Des_Foins_(1881).jpg
There are probably any number of carousing peasant women in various Pieter Breugel the Elder paintings who do some farm labour of some sort.
There is also a woman in American Gothic. Is this strip meant to imply that the old farmer is cheating on his partner? And with an older woman (about 400 years older)
@ Mike – Having recently read more than I ever needed to know about “American Gothic“, one surprising detail I discovered was that the woman in the painting is not the farmer’s wife: it’s supposed to be his daughter.
@ Kilby – And the models for the people in the painting were the artist’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby.
Here is a link showing a picture of them standing next to the painting:
https://kottke.org/12/02/the-models-for-american-gothic
>The implication being that dating sites mismatch people.
>The farmer in “American Gothic” doesn’t belong with “Mona Lisa, ”
Why not? If they are that mismatched Mona Lisa would never have been on FarmersOnly.com in the first place. If she was, then she wanted a farmer in which case… why is it supposed to be obvious they are mismatched?
I think this is just a missed putt.
I wonder whether the dentist was deliberately looking dour in the photo, to match the painting, or this was just his natural expression (“I AM smiling!”)
@ Pinny – Thanks for that link: that was a very interesting picture!
P.S. @ narmitaj – WordPress messed up the link, but after I reattached the “.jpg”, I discovered that the girl in that painting has a supremely advantageous quality: she likes rakes!