August, 1933: More cultural references to decipher.
Did I miss some modern artifact (radio in 1933, or a refrigerator)?
There was a rather turbulent mayoral election in New York in 1933: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_New_York_City_mayoral_election
It took a while to find a candidate who would fly with the voters.
Euphemism?
Is Mooney someone we would have known?
Chemgal sends this in, as does billr as well.
Some might say making a joke this obscure really isn’t cricket.
This first one may not strictly count as CIDU, since in the end I do understand it. But it took a lot of work!
For this other one, the song quoted and the musician mentioned are easily verified to match up, even if not in your personal playlist. But …
… but I genuinely don’t get the part about “If you’re gonna sound like a Karen…” — there doesn’t seem to be enough basis to take that in the contemporary quasi-political sense of a denigrating term for a woman being fussy in a certain way. And without that, what is there for “sound like a Karen” to mean?
targuman sent:
noting, “I know the phrase ‘Idle hands make the Devil’s workshop’ (or similarly ‘Idle hands make for the Devil’s work’) but I don’t see the Devil working here…just hopping. I get that the idea is sort of like a kid leaving Legos on the floor, but it just doesn’t quite connect for me.”
We have a guess as to the intended story/joke here, but figured we’d let the assembled braintrust have at it.
Uh-oh! “Arlo” warning for younger and more sensitive viewers.
As many here will already know, these Nick G “comics” originate as illustrations accompanying the Washington Post advice column conducted by Carolyn Hax. The connection is sometimes close, and often sort of tangential. The column is behind a paywall, but for those interested here is a free “gift article link” to the August 23 column.
It bothers me (mitch) a little bit that this seems to depend on fission being more dramatically explosive than fusion. But still it’s wordplay and it’s pretty funny…
Parisi himself made the following comments:
“The coffin is ajar”
“Now he’ll be berried”
As for me, I’d like to toast the deceased.
Was there a particular Abercrombie famous in 1966, that readers would have recognized? And thereby gotten a joke? Or just a fanciful name, whose associations we no longer get? And would the lecture have been about food spoilage and safety, or is her remark directed at the idea of putting up with something you regard as unpleasant?
Mark H. notes: If you study the cartoon carefully, you’ll notice that it is impossible in a clinch like that for the glasses to be in that position on Edda’s nose. The bend of the temples would be up, not down.
Unless the clinch was significantly more complex than we were shown…
There are many Reynolds movies I haven’t seen. Is this a reference to a scene in one of them?
This week’s Beetle Bailey is confusing in a couple of ways:
I have to assume the first panel is a throwaway…but still don’t get the point?! Why is a lieutenant asking a sergeant if he needs to “spice up” his report? And in the rest, ok, there’s a mouse…and?
Comics I Don't Understand 