



Sender Dana K
and I were in minor disagreement over whether the word-play element here is pun-like enough to count as an OY. “Neg/Q Scope Ambiguity” is certainly there potentially in the 3rd panel; but it’s not clearly intentional, and even less the point of the gag.






This Moderately Confused sent in by Rob is in what we might dub the “foibles funnies” genre:


Out of season
Two funny bits that seem like they might belong more to winter publication. The Kliban of course is a reprint from ages ago, so that makes sense. And the Liz Climo is funny any time. Also noticed by Andréa and used in a comment!
Hey, Kliban, stop assigning me jobs!
(Yes, normal egocentrism does make me think any reference to “Carl” is me, at least initially.)
@ Carl – Just be thankful that your parents didn’t name you “Doug”:
Mental Health Hotline Answering Machine . . .
“Brown smurfs” is pretty off-putting, probably even a little worse than “skid marks”.
The psychiatric hotline answer machine reminded me of this classic: https://salvolomas.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/parkingdiagnostics.pdf
Thanks for that article, Mark! I’m assuming that the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity is not quite real, unlike say Journal of Irreproducible Results or Annals of Improbable Research. ( But if they were real they could perhaps employ a copy-editor who could fix the places where the authors wrote lead for led. )
And another hotline . . .
https://xkcd.com/2633/
(remember to check out the hovertext/altext/whatever it’s called.
Robert is NOT a comics person. From time to time I show him a comic I think he might like (or is an CIDU to me that I am pretty sure he will be explain as his brain works much more main stream than how oddly mine does). I showed him the Liz Climo when I read it and he actually LIKED it.