September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by EditorM

Knitting a Searle Cardigan? (Bonus CIDU)

Thanks to Harvey Heilbrun for separately submitting and discussing this one:

Yes, you’ve seen it before! It was embedded as a comment in the “Shouldn’t his brow be knitted?” thread, and discussed in some respects, alongside the cartoon in the main post there.

The discussion there touched on the relation of Nick G’s illustrations to the Carolyn Hax advice column, and on the palpable relation to The Scarlet Letter. But Harvey points out something not noticed in that discussion: The man’s newspaper has a mostly legible title or headline on the visible back page: “After Searle”.

Harvey and the editors all figure this refers to John Searle, prominent American philosopher — and not to, say, the big pharma company. But what is the point? Is Nick sneaking an irrelevancy past us? Or hinting at a connection?

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by phsiii

Goodness Gracious!

More an OY, possibly an Arlo-OY, or what my sister calls a “time joke”—one that you get, but it takes a moment.

zbicyclist suggests accompaniment and/or a hint via a link to this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F569_t2jCio

He notes, “If you watch closely, the lip synch (particularly for the piano playing) has a few misses in it” and that another, actually live performance is better in that regard:

September 29, 2022September 27, 2022 by EditorM

The Jiggs is up

Sent by Dirk the Daring, who says “This may be from 1948, but I still don’t get it.” And some of us who are from 1949 still don’t get it either.

And to start off, who are the characters in the final panel? The guy stretched out must be the tall loudmouth from the main encounter. But the guy across the street is not wearing Jiggs’s patterned waistcoat, and might be just a passerby / witness. But this still leaves open the question, What exactly was the bone of contention?

September 28, 2022September 25, 2022 by zbicyclist

Shouldn’t his brow be knitted?

Kenneth Berkun sends in this puzzler from the New Yorker.

The joke would be simpler to understand if we had the inbox with yarn and the outbox with garments with a knitting grandmother in the middle. Then the joke would be that the knitter was treating her hobby as if she was (still) in an office.

So, the CIDU question would be why put it in a business office context? Why does the businessman have that deer-in-the-headlights look? Why, if he has the status to get a window office with such a nice view of the skyline, does he have so many pens, and why are they in his suitcoat? Or, are these details just because Roz Chast probably hasn’t spent much time in a business office (lucky her)?

And should the presence of the inbox and outbox pair be a geezer alert? I don’t think I had an outbox since the mid-1990s, and my physical inbox didn’t have much in it.

September 27, 2022September 22, 2022 by EditorM

If this depends on “cartoon biology” I’m done with it!

They forgot their … … … lungs??

September 26, 2022September 25, 2022 by phsiii

The Final Flashbacks

As noted previously, Flashbacks ended on 2022-09-25. Since the strip is not widely distributed and generally not on the web, here’s the final iteration.

September 25, 2022September 21, 2023 by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, September 25th, 2022

Nice to meet a dragon these days that isn’t a Game of Thrones nor a Wagnerian dragon.

More evidence for the idea that any philosophical system extended too far develops problems.

It’s in the detail!

The allusion surely does not need explication here at CIDU!

Okay, we’ll allow an Ewww-LOL this time!

September 24, 2022September 23, 2022 by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – September 24th, 2022

Ah, the eternal question: to explain or not to explain?

From Andréa, who calls it “An OY that may, or may not, have been intended”:

And it misses a third reading, an imperative exclamation equivalent to “Shoo!”.

September 23, 2022September 24, 2022 by phsiii

Flashbacks is ending

Not sure how many readers are familiar with Patrick Reynolds’ Flashbacks strip. It appears on the comics pages but isn’t funny (deliberately, unlike The Family Circus): it’s a Sunday strip about historical events that’s been running, mostly in The Washington Post, for 31 years. He hasn’t put it on the web, further reducing its exposure.

It has provided a fascinating look into sometimes-small, sometimes-large bits of history, and is ending this Sunday, September 25, 2022. It will be missed by those of us who saw it every week, but at 79, I’m sure everyone would agree that Mr. Reynolds deserves the time off!

For his last five strips, he’s been running stories in which he had some personal involvement. We’re running the first four below, and will add the fifth once it comes out; it seemed better to run this now, so anyone who was vaguely aware of the strip would have a chance to see it “in the flesh” one last time.

You can find more about the end of Flashbacks here, and this is Mr. Reynolds’ home page, including links to his books.

The final strips are below. Alas, I missed scanning the first two. I got the first one from the article linked above; the second I got directly from Mr. Reynolds, hence the super-high quality!

September 22, 2022September 20, 2022 by EditorM

Flutter-byes

Previously (in https://cidu.info/2022/05/16/never-wear-around-your-neck-anything-that-comes-out-of-your-tail-end/ ) we explored the precedence of flutter-by before butterfly — to the surprise of many, including me.

Recently Andréa noticed: “BTW – I don’t know if it’s because of Monarch Butterfly Migration Season, or what, but have YOU noticed a plethora of caterpillar-to-butterfly jokes? I think I’ve seen 15-20 in the past week.”

Then almost immediately after seeing her mail, I ran across this from David Borchart in “Bob Mankoff presents: show me the funny (animal edition)” at Comics Kingdom: