A Sad-LOL for sure!
Or is this maybe a Semi-CIDU for anybody?
McDonald’s decides to open one test site for a new concept, CosMc’s, to overmuch social media hype, and now a tip of the hat from Greg Cravens. In the current iteration, it’s drive-thru only, with no restrooms.
The “5-31” in the panel is easy enough, but I’m having a hard time making out the year in the (c) strip. Scrolling in the Comics Kingdom archive to the previous few strips, I think it could be 1967.
Which is maybe late enough that she might have turned out to be the surgeon rather than the nurse. (Certainly by that year the joke/riddle of “A father and his son were out for a Sunday drive” was already quite popular.) Or no, how could a surgeon go out with an enlisted man?
[Does anybody need the rest of the story??]
Comics I Don't Understand 
For the Andertoons, I did have a moment of hesitation, but that is the Cookie Monster, right? And he shouldn’t be hanging around the Keebler Elf’s home/shop where the cookies are being made.
But I am totally bewildered by the pirate in the pink bunny suit!
The pirate in the pink bunny suit is a reference to A Christmas Story, a 1983 Christmas comedy film directed by Bob Clark and based on Jean Shepherd’s semi-fictional anecdotes in his 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. There was a big celebration in Hammond, Indiana this weekend celebrating the 40th anniversary of the movie. I would imagine a major award was handed out.
For Christmas, a doting relative gives Ralphie a pink bunny suit. He desperately wants a BB gun, but all the adults tell him that he’ll shoot his eye out.
The year on that Beetle Bailey strip is definitely 1967, but I do not subscribe to Comics Kingdom, and was not able to find anything anywhere nearly that old in the archive. The idea that the woman might be a surgeon (rather that “just” a nurse), or that Killer went there to meet a steady girlfriend (rather than chatting up the first available female with adequate looks) is far too progressive for the antiquated morality of the strip back then. Killer was always (and probably still is) a typical skirt chaser, and would fit right in with the men in “B.C.” of that era, who occasionally went looking for dates with a wooden club, rather than flowers. Dragging the ladies back to the cave was a little hard on their hair, but it was more reliable than just “asking” (because they would of course said “no”).
Actually, an enlisted man couldn’t date a nurse in 1967, either. They were all officers (still are).
It’s unsurprising that Killer would break the rules, of course.
Killer wouldn’t have needed to ask Sarge for permission to visit someone in the camp (I don’t recall Camp Swampy having a full surgical hospital anyway), he was asking for a pass to town. So the nurse he’s putting moves on is a civilian. We just skipped over Killer sweet-talking his way past the hospital front desk.
Is that Ziggy in the first one?
The popular “stumper” that was around, and was used to make a now-obvious point, by 1967.
A father and son were out for a drive, but had a terrible accident. The father was dead at the scene, but the boy survived the crash and was rushed to the nearest hospital.
The surgeon scrubbed up and entered the OR, but then upon seeing the patient exclaimed “I can’t operate on this boy — he’s my son!”. How could this be?
Attempted but rejected answers: The surgeon is like the boy’s stepfather. – The police at the scene just assumed the man killed in the crash was the boy’s father, but he wasn’t. – The boy in the crash had an identical cousin, and the surgeon who was the boy’s uncle mistakenly thought he was seeing his own son, the actual crash victim’s identical cousin. …
Answer revealed: Aha, the surgeon is the boy’s mother!
The woman is wearing a nurse’s cap, so there’s no chance she’s a doctor.
“The woman is wearing a nurse’s cap, so there’s no chance she’s a doctor.” Also, @phsiii, she’s carrying a tray of surgical implements. Generally, surgeons don’t do that. She’s also carrying a surgical mask, but not wearing gloves.
I don’t think there was actually speculation that the woman pictured might be a surgeon. Rather, with different setting and contexts, the joke could have ended with the punch line that the “friend who has been in surgery all morning” meant a doctor, not a patient.
And it seems Anderson has not shaken that desire to cartoon about the Keebler elves. (This was Sunday.)
I thought the guy hanging around the Keebler tree was a frog. He certainly looks like a frog, but not like Kermit. Not that much like the Cookie Monster either for that matter.
Actually, an enlisted man couldn’t date a nurse in 1967, either. They were all officers (still are).
I believe it was in Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific that I read about this. I think he said that the reason nurses were officers had to do with fraternization rules. This then caused some problems on the isolated islands, where the enlisted men had few options in that regard.
Googling “why are nurses officers” gets:
Nurses (RN’s) are Army officers because they have Bachelor’s degrees—BSN—which qualifies them to be an officer. They carry the same rank as non-nurses in the Army. And, they work their way up in rank like any officer. Nurses also attend OTS—Officers’ Training School, like any person with a 4 year college degree does, to become a US Army Officer.
Other pages just kinda say “Because they are”. I mean, there’s a sense in which you could ask “Why is a Lieutenant an officer?” and the answer is “Because”. I suppose the meta-question is, “Why did something think that was a good idea, back when women ‘didn’t belong’ in the military at all, per most men’s thinking?” And maybe the answer is that someone was smart enough to realize that was stupid, or maybe that this would give nurses some protection against enlisted men (because of course officers were gentlemen!), and prevent fraternization (the official term, it seems).
Wikipedia includes:
Though generally treated as officers socially and professionally, and wearing uniform stripes similar to those for the officer ranks of Ensign through Lieutenant Commander, formal recognition as Commissioned officers did not come until World War II.
The cookie monster, I recognize. The Sunday Andertoon is a CIDU for me.
Darren, I probably don’t get it either, inasmuch as I don’t at all recognize the girl (or is she more a diminutive woman?). But there seems to be a simple joke in the “This is me” statement, as though it were just another building along the street.
The surgeon being a woman is a joke that went from being difficult to answer, to being easy, then back to difficult.
At first the concept of a woman surgeon was very foreign.
As women progressively occupied more of these roles, the question was easier to answer.
These days it is far more common than it used to be to have parents of the same gender, so the surgeon could still be the boy’s father.. just just the other father.
Carl Fink writes:
Sure, in a military hospital. Perhaps this is a civilian hospital.
I took the “Well, this is me” to be the ending of a night out with a date. He’s dropping her off.
Other than that, I don’t know.
I agree with Grawlix about the “date”, and the “this is me” part simply means that she’s a Keebler elf, so that’s her house.
@Norm V: That can’t be Ziggy. He’s wearing pants.
Carl Fink – you brought back an old memory. When I was in elementary school I used to play “army” with some of the boys at lunch time. (Yeah, I was always a strange child.) Of course being female I had to be “the nurse”. I had read a number of Cherry Ames (a book series like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys from the same company and Cherry Ames is a nurse – including in one book an army nurse. Danny who had told me this was “the Sargent. (Spell check insists it should be a capital S.) I agreed to being the nurse.
He started ordering “the soldiers” and me around. I told him that I did not listen to him. “I AM the Sargent and in charge.” My reply “You told me that I have to be a nurse. Nurses enter the Army as lieutenants. So I am a lieutenant and you are only a Sargent. He did not like that idea.
I think the capital ‘S’ was to make it a name, like Sargent Shriver. The rank is sergeant.
Brian, certainly the issue is complicated by names like Sargent Shriver; and the ranks when discussed without link to individuals holding that rank are lower case; but when a rank accompanies a name and functions like a title believe it is then capitalized: Why hello there, General Patton! Did Captain Queeg get his ice cream today? Have you heard from Major Major?
I agree with MiB @12 that Anderson’s Cookie Monster looks very froglike, but he doesn’t have the luxury of using identifying colors, like Foxtrot did last Sunday:
when a rank accompanies a name and functions like a title believe it is then capitalized
Yes, but I was specifically addressing the spellcheck problem and why capitalizing it seemed to be required.