Perfectly good comics. But you have the nagging feeling the joke or pun would work just a tiny bit better if this-or-that could be edited a trifle.
(Thus CIDUs by a polite extension — “I don’t understand why this little matter couldn’t be fixed up…”)
Here, for instance, the traditional form uses “get a haircut / hair cut” and always works smoothly; unlike in this strip, where the dialogue in panel 2 is quite unnatural. “Hey Harv, didja get a hair cut?” , “Nah, I got them all cut! Heh heh!”
A good chuckle from Arlo and Janis, sent in by Jack Applin who has a point about “breaking serve”.
As Jack explains, As I understand it, to “break serve” means to score a point in tennis when your opponent serves. However, Janis was serving (“Did you cover the charcoal fire?”), and Arlo neglected to do that, so Janis scored the point on her own serve, right? Even if we consider the entire strip one long volley, Janis still asked the initial question, so she’s serving.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Yeah, that would be either a “service winner” or a “service ace”, would it not?
I not sure about “service ace” here – but that depends on whether the “plot” of the whole strip is one rally(?) following a single serve, or somehow a series of alternating serves (which doesn’t fit the pattern of tennis). If the whole strip is one tennis point, then it was Janis’s serve – and she won the point, so it is not “break of serve” – but the ball as hit back and forth a few times, so it was not an “ace”, which is a serve that is not returned.
Well maybe Arlo switching off the lamp and grinning was the opening serve. Then after four or five hits in the rally , he did not properly return her question about the grill, so it was her point and broke his serve.
The modified wording in the Barney and Clyde strip is absolutely necessary for the intended gag. With the normal “hair cut” phrasing, the question is how much hair is to be cut. Barney’s emphasis on “hairs cut” is a claim about how much hair he actually has, so that the barber’s insistence on the singular form becomes an insult, calling attention to his baldness.
If I was already in bed, and my wife asked me if I did something, I would say “of course I did,” whether I did it or not.
Why do I now have to log in?
Nah, nobody can say what the second panel currently has. Not even the baldING plutocrat. :-)
What he possibly could say (if we’re insisting on a plural) includes “I’m ready for a hairs-cut”. Or even “I’m ready for some hairs cut”. Or perhaps “I’m ready for some hairs-cutting.”. But not the very lacking “I’m ready for hairs cut”.
Over-confident mumblings of a self-assured pompous jerk.
I have an entire ceremony before we go upstairs to bed at night.
I check the kitchen door is locked I say “fed the Ted” (the lock looks like the face of a teddy bear and I can see the bar of the lock going across into the wall). I check the stove is off I say “1 2 3 4 OFF, oven off. I check that that the fridge is closed and I say “fridge is closed”. I pick up all of the stuff to go upstairs. I then repeat checking everything.
The “pantry” door has to be closed. (A closet in the corner of the kitchen with shelves and across from the bathroom – yes, technically our downstairs “half bath” is located within our kitchen – 1940s construction.)
We then can go upstairs to bed. Some nights I have to go down and check everything again.
In the “mistake or on purpose?” department: Here “A.C./D.C” is serving as the band name (even though the proprietor disavows that) and “air conditioning in the District of Columbia”. But can that work without even a nod to the original meaning of “Alternating Current / Direct Current”?
Mitch4, I don’t think it needs the electrical meaning to work.
Note that the boys standing in front of the counter ARE the band, in case it wasn’t obvious.
The guy must sell an awful lot of air conditioners to run a shop with a view like that. Or very expensive ones, probably to the government.
Anyway, I think an electricity joke might help the gag but isn’t necessary. The only caveat is that the band was reportedly (via Wikipedia) named after an AC/DC switch on a sewing machine, so it could end up a little like rhyming a word with itself if they aren’t careful.
It could potentially be funny to have an Angry Church Lady marching up in the background with literature in hand reading “Anti-Christ / Devil’s Child,” referring to an old urban legend about the band name origin (which I don’t see referenced on Wikipedia).
I guess it is uncertain whether this was a factor in the band selecting that name, but in the 60s and 70s , clearly based on the availability of appliances which could switch plug attachments and run on either A.C. or D.C., there was a vernacular meaning of “A.C./D.C.” as a label for someone who was a “switch hitter” in terms of sexual orientation.
In case you are wondering about Direct Current, as late as 1970 one of the dormitories at Boston University was still wired for DC instead of AC. Lamps worked fine, but you needed a converter to run a hair dryer.