This took me a minute, as I don’t often use “home” for a physical house, the building.
For anyone not familiar with the comic, the character on the right, Lyndon, is a psychiatrist or therapist. So Freudian slips are like his stock in trade. But there is something funny in how this patient or client responds to the “Say again?” with an almost-repetition and not acknowledging he has made a correction.
An excellent OY that also had me at least chuckling out loud.
(But I have to confess I don’t know who the guy on the right is. I hope his identity wasn’t another part of the joke.)
Thanks to Rob for these next two OYs (and some hard-to-classify strips coming up elsewhere on the site):
I guess I’m wrong here — I would have said this doesn’t work unless he actually says “Heckuva” (variation possible for the c and/or k, but the v obligatory). But the crowd at GoComics seemed to take it in stride.
And a Sandal Synchronicity:
Comics I Don't Understand 
The “guy to the right” of Iron Man in the BIZARRO cartoon is Captain America. They’re both members of The Avengers, but I don’t think his identity is “part of the joke” — Hawkeye or various other costumed heros would have worked just as well here, I think.
It probably doesn’t matter which superhero is inflicting laundry duty on Iron Man, but it does help that it is a recognizable, relatively well-known character. Hawkeye would have been too obscure for me, although Super-, Bat-, and Spiderman might have been too blatant. On the other hand, putting Wonder Woman In that spot might have added a bit of amusing social commentary to the humor.
P.S. As long as I’m making suggestions, the Bizayno/Wazarro comic would have been better with a skunk instead of the raccoon, and the Tom Falco panel would have been the perfect punchline to follow the two “sandal” strips at the end of this post.
Why a skunk? They aren’t particularly attracted to bad smells. They use their own bad smell to warn others away.
As for “Hecuba”, /b/ and /v/ are very close (especially when unstressed), even merging in some dialects like certain varieties of Spanish. Pardon my pseudo-phonetics here, but “HECK-uh-buh” is a perfectly good pun for “HECK-uh-vuh”. If there’s a problem with the pun, it’s the second syllable; the ancient name is actually pronounced “HEH-kyoo-buh”, and that makes it harder to pull off the pun.
@Kilby, Captain America and Iron Man are actually friends/colleagues. Wonder Woman, in continuity, has never met or heard of him.
What’s Hecuba to Powers, or he to Hecuba? Well, evidently enough to be a correct authority about how we in Anglophonia pronounce her name!
But that to me motivates wanting to see more difference between the spellings of Grandpa’s use in the last panel (where it is not just the name) and the several instances earlier. If we saw “hekuva” we would know not to hear the middle -kyoo-.
I agree that the palatalized form is more standard in English (the “HEH-kyoo-buh”). But supposing they are saying it that way in the One Big Happy would just collapse the joke entirely, it seems to me.
@ Carl Fink – My ignorance of comic strip continuity is something I am very careful to maintain. However, after reviewing a long list of Avengers team members, I was disappointed to discover that there is not a single female member with adequate name and appearance recognition to satisfy the needs of a syndicated newspaper comic, with the possible exception of Spider Woman. Yes, one could consider using the Invisible Woman (I remember her from the Fantastic Four), but for this purpose invisibility would not be an asset.
Maybe have Wonder Woman in the distance with a thought bubble “I wonder what they’re talking about”.
Q: What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? A: The two thinnest volumes of the encyclopedia.
Cap & Tony have exactly the relationship that makes the cartoon work.
“Hecuba / Heck of a” is no worse than most other puns I’ve heard. “Name him Theophilus because he’s Theophilus looking kid I ever saw.” “In Africa, the elephants’ tusks are too tight. In Alabama, Tuskaloosa.”
in re Hecuba, I offer this quote :
“Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian?’
Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips.
‘It’s Yossarian’s name, sir,’ he explained.
I think real estate salesfolk are apt to refer to houses as homes, especially fancy ones.
Back when I was living in an apartment years ago, I got in a semi-dispute with the management. We passed notes back and forth. They would refer to my apartment as a “unit” and I would call it my “home”.
And what the hell kind of a name is Scheisskopf?
@ Mitch – I’m sure that the name was simply a direct translation (it does not exist in German). Heller probably expected that the publishers would not let him call the character “Lieutenant $#!+head”.
Maybe Wayno put a raccoon rather than a skunk at the wheel because the air putrifier is a trash can. Coons are sometimes called trash pandas, after their penchant for suburban garbage cans.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trash%20panda
And a few days later . . .
I have to give credit to Whamond for some accurate criticism, but it would have been just as accurate 20 years ago, before the massive barrage of MCU movies.
I have probably mentioned (too many times even) that we almost always have problems with deliveries. (For awhile we had help with this by using something “street addressing” with our PO box as we could order items and give the PO’s address with our box number as #456 instead of using PO Box 456. This worked well until the pandemic came along and we switched almost all our mail back to our home address so we did not have to go to the PO. Ordering items does not work well – presuming items as ordered – ha ha, items not damaged – ha ha, items not left at foot of driveway – live on 4 lane main road across street from bus stop. Wrong item is not sent (had to pay shipping to Canada when sent “marine” version of CO detector instead of RV CO detector as ordered). Items damaged – 60% of cans dented – some almost in half, boxed food (such as crackers, mixes) – boxes looked stepped on, plastic bottles with neck of bottle pushed into the bottle (cooking oil).
But the latest situation – and one I cannot believe – our reenactment unit needed to put in an order for “powder” (not using describing word so not picked up by any scanning to remove post). Unit uses 2 kinds of same depending on what it is being used in. Every several years the unit needs more and Robert makes the arrangements for the order with the company we order it from and then we go and get a bank check to send as payment. An adult has to be home to sign for the package(s).
The order does not come to us. In normal times we would be not home during the day. Right now we have not been going to events so we wanted someone who is going to events (and is on the Board) to accept the delivery. There was a shortage of same and the company had to wait to get an order to fill our order. They finally emailed and told us when it would coming and reminding us that someone over 21 had to be home to sign for it. The fellow who was accepting the delivery was upset that it was late in the day and he still did not have the packages. He looked it up online. They had left at his door without getting it signed for!!!! 50lbs worth!!!! Luckily it did not go astray.
This one uses that same Iron Man joke, as a side show.
@Andrea – wow, you really do have poor consumer protection laws…