Extending the “counting on cartoon fingers” topic from Tuesday, Mark H. also submitted this Baby Blues strip, commenting: “Isn’t Uranus the seventh planet, not the eighth?“
Mark is exactly right. The author must be missing a finger or two. Besides that, “Earth” and “Mars” are the only two planets in the whole Solar System that do not have at least one “U” in their names.
Kilby adds: I witnessed (and participated in) the most uproarious pandemonium I have ever experienced in a school classroom during a presentation about the seventh (and not the eighth) planet in junior high school. The student at the board was trying (but failing) to maintain his composure, and everyone in the room (except the teacher) was giggling at least a little bit at the sophomoric joke inherent in the repeated pronunciations of the name.
The fatal mistake occurred when the kid attempted a quick sketch of the planet’s (severely tilted) axis. His intent was to draw a circle with a horizontal line through it, much like a Greek “Theta” (ϴ), but his subconscious played a trick on him, and the resulting diagram had a vertical line, just like a Greek “Phi” (Φ), or (as we all immediately recognized) “two cheeks of the moon“. Everyone in the room blew up: all the students were laughing, and even the teacher’s unbridled fury could not restore order.
Even now, nearly five decades later, and although I have attempted to keep these paragraphs as dry and objective as possible, I cannot help but giggle at the memory of the scene, so I understand exactly the way Hammie feels in the strip above.
Comics I Don't Understand 
P.S. If we count the Sun and Pluto, that makes 8 out of 10 major solar system components in the “U” category.
If one accepts the idea that the asteroid belt was once a planet, then Uranus would be eighth. But those foolish Mysterions had to blow it up!
The comment is, “It was the only way he could get past the 8th planet.”
In other words, it was the only way he could say all 8 planets. They aren’t saying Uranus is the 8th planet.
Having them say “Urinous” is not really all that much better! 🙄
But TedD, he didn’t get past the 8th planet. That’s where he cracked up.
This is why in the future we changed the name of the planet to Urectum.
The original idea was to name it George, after the English king George III.
That didn’t fly, perhaps because that would seem to put George in the pantheon of the gods. But it would have been a kindness to middle school teachers.
Powers – He did get past the 8th planet. He said Neptune and then started cracking up.
More trivia: Uranus was discovered by Herschel in 1781.
Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, was discovered by Piazzi in 1801, and also declared a planet, so for a while Uranus was the 8th planet from the sun.
Ceres was later classed as an asteroid and now is considered a dwarf planet.
I did find a way to avoid both “your anus” and “urine-ous” by going with an older spelling and pronouncing that: Ouranos. Ore-an-ose.
The “obvious” (to me at least) solution is to pronounce the name of #7 as Oo-raw-nuss.
BTW, and by analogy with the B-, C-, F-, and N-words, a U-word must be one that begins with the letter U. Venus, Jupiter, Pluto, et al do not qualify.
Still funny to we juveniles that never grew up.
@ ootenaboot – Yes, I admit that I knew that there’s only one planet whose name qualifies as a “U”-word, but I still thought it was an amusing piece of trivia. The percentage would have been even higher than @1 if satellites could be spelled as “munes”, but it’s not as if every double-“oo” can be changed to a “u”. 😉
The “exploded planet” view of the asteroid belt is pretty much gone in modern astronomy. For one thing, the combined mass of all the minor bodies is around 2.39×1021 kg. You can compare that the to Pluto’s mass at about 1.3×1022 kg or Earth’s moon at around 7.3×1022 kg.
The studies of the gravitational effects of Jupiter show that there was likely too much disruption to allow formation of a larger body.