The elevator call button scenario is a familiar trope for Horace :
But others are not banned from exploring a similar idea:
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An OY!
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It’s nice to see Parisi taking on what I think you were quite right to call a DSOH trope! And he does a good job with it, recalling the trope but still surprising us.
Those two “Squeeze Play” comics were the only ones in this set that I remember seeing before in a post, but the discussion in September got derailed by the new “login” comment window.
“It’s blurry in real life” is something some cryptid-hunters (or cryptid-grifters if you prefer) will actually say without a trace of irony. Bigfoot, Nessie, any imaginary being famous for appearing in blurry photographs, all are – and I hope I’m not getting too technical – something something quantum gobbledygook extremely quantum creatures that are hard to perceive.
Funnily, this is something I learned from the blog stylings of another comic reviewer, Josh Fruhlinger, aka the Comics Curmudgeon.
Back a million years, when I was in high school, there was a show called Scholar Quiz. A fairly common format of teams of three competing answering questions. I tried out.
My most triumphant get in trials was, “What is a rectangular rhombus”. I didn’t know it beforehand, but deduced that the answer was a “a square”.
I didn’t make the team. I got a personal debrief from the faculty sponsor as I was second runner-up, sixth overall. He related that I was very strong in math and science, but too weak in current affairs. I couldn’t argue with the assessment.
The aggressive treatment comic appears twice, and seems to imply injecting a cubic meter of air into the patient.
Yee-Haw Law Firm!
“The aggressive treatment comic appears twice”
They must have been pretty insistent about their inclusion, even in the face of “we’ve got you taken care of already”
@ Carl Fink (6) – The “featured image” (by Duffy) above the headline is repeated later, too, but that is consistent with the principle of preferring “more” over “less“.
Also, the “featured image” for a post does not show up on all views. So if it is something from a listing below, keeping it in place there preserves its presence for those using reader view, and perhaps the phone or tablet views (I haven’t verified for those).
@ Brian in StL (5) – There was (and still is) a very similar show in the D.C. area called “It’s Academic“. My experience was similar to yours: I got squeezed out and ended up sitting in the audience rather than on stage, but that wasn’t so bad, because our team got slaughtered.
There were various high school versions. I think inspired by the old College Bowl quiz show.
Our team was very good. Even had a I made it on, I would have just been the alternate, who never appeared in any of the shows, so just as well. Of the three main participants, two were friends and the other an acquaintance.
I was on a team in grade 8 (Ontario, so not “8th grade”) on a local cable channel. They were so cheap that we didn’t even had buzzers–we raised our hands to answer! And at least two of THEIR answers were wrong: they asked what language was spoken in Brazil. Well, my dad had taught there and my parents had visited and were learning Portuguese, so of course I said Portuguese. “No, Spanish”. I opened my mouth and my teacher, sitting in the front row, shook her head slightly so I STFU. Then “32 is 2 to what power?” and I said “Five” and they said “No, six” Um. No. We won handily anyway.
In high school I did a couple of years of Reach For the Top, which was the same idea but on CBC, with buzzers and everything. Our team never took it super-seriously: we met a few times but didn’t drill or have assigned areas of expertise. Won a few games, lost a few. Best time was before they started taping, when they’d have us do some practice questions to warm up. They happened to pull the script from our previous game, and we scared the heck out of the other team because we knew all the answers!
Good times: four kids and a couple of teachers piling into an old van on a Sunday morning to drive an hour to the TV station in a blizzard. I’m guessing that wouldn’t be allowed nowadays…
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s nice to see Parisi taking on what I think you were quite right to call a DSOH trope! And he does a good job with it, recalling the trope but still surprising us.
Those two “Squeeze Play” comics were the only ones in this set that I remember seeing before in a post, but the discussion in September got derailed by the new “login” comment window.
“It’s blurry in real life” is something some cryptid-hunters (or cryptid-grifters if you prefer) will actually say without a trace of irony. Bigfoot, Nessie, any imaginary being famous for appearing in blurry photographs, all are – and I hope I’m not getting too technical – something something quantum gobbledygook extremely quantum creatures that are hard to perceive.
Funnily, this is something I learned from the blog stylings of another comic reviewer, Josh Fruhlinger, aka the Comics Curmudgeon.
@AM: XKCD addressed that perfectly more than ten years ago.
https://xkcd.com/1235/
Back a million years, when I was in high school, there was a show called Scholar Quiz. A fairly common format of teams of three competing answering questions. I tried out.
My most triumphant get in trials was, “What is a rectangular rhombus”. I didn’t know it beforehand, but deduced that the answer was a “a square”.
I didn’t make the team. I got a personal debrief from the faculty sponsor as I was second runner-up, sixth overall. He related that I was very strong in math and science, but too weak in current affairs. I couldn’t argue with the assessment.
The aggressive treatment comic appears twice, and seems to imply injecting a cubic meter of air into the patient.
Yee-Haw Law Firm!
“The aggressive treatment comic appears twice”
They must have been pretty insistent about their inclusion, even in the face of “we’ve got you taken care of already”
@ Carl Fink (6) – The “featured image” (by Duffy) above the headline is repeated later, too, but that is consistent with the principle of preferring “more” over “less“.
Also, the “featured image” for a post does not show up on all views. So if it is something from a listing below, keeping it in place there preserves its presence for those using reader view, and perhaps the phone or tablet views (I haven’t verified for those).
@ Brian in StL (5) – There was (and still is) a very similar show in the D.C. area called “It’s Academic“. My experience was similar to yours: I got squeezed out and ended up sitting in the audience rather than on stage, but that wasn’t so bad, because our team got slaughtered.
There were various high school versions. I think inspired by the old College Bowl quiz show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Bowl
Our team was very good. Even had a I made it on, I would have just been the alternate, who never appeared in any of the shows, so just as well. Of the three main participants, two were friends and the other an acquaintance.
I was on a team in grade 8 (Ontario, so not “8th grade”) on a local cable channel. They were so cheap that we didn’t even had buzzers–we raised our hands to answer! And at least two of THEIR answers were wrong: they asked what language was spoken in Brazil. Well, my dad had taught there and my parents had visited and were learning Portuguese, so of course I said Portuguese. “No, Spanish”. I opened my mouth and my teacher, sitting in the front row, shook her head slightly so I STFU. Then “32 is 2 to what power?” and I said “Five” and they said “No, six” Um. No. We won handily anyway.
In high school I did a couple of years of Reach For the Top, which was the same idea but on CBC, with buzzers and everything. Our team never took it super-seriously: we met a few times but didn’t drill or have assigned areas of expertise. Won a few games, lost a few. Best time was before they started taping, when they’d have us do some practice questions to warm up. They happened to pull the script from our previous game, and we scared the heck out of the other team because we knew all the answers!
Good times: four kids and a couple of teachers piling into an old van on a Sunday morning to drive an hour to the TV station in a blizzard. I’m guessing that wouldn’t be allowed nowadays…