Thanks to Mark H.:
These were separated by five days (12/26 and 1/1), but the intervening strips didn’t seem to help.
Mitch suggested “I think there is supposed to be a confusion-of-twins plot going on” but I’m still lost. And Mike mooted “I think newspaper editors have just decided to give 9CL a permanent pass”, which might well be true, but surely Brooke had something in mind!?
Harry sent this Carpe Diem. Zooming in on the mirror, it seems to show two people walking on the shoulder, which seems neither odd nor funny?!
It’s the poodle that stumps me. I know what a standard poodle is–friend had one, bog-standard except for floppy ears option (also uncharacteristically dumb as a post: it would frequently sleep under the kitchen table, then wake up and run headlong into a table leg). But what makes this a SUBstandard poodle? I do like the biscuit-shaped phone case!
…of being often incomprehensible:
I know what “spoon” means here, but???
This is a scan of a page my sister found in my parents’ house after they passed, with a note from my dad:
The summer I was six I was sent to camp for about six weeks. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it wasn’t really bad. The best part, of course, was leaving to go home. My mother came in the Model A touring car and fetched me at the end of August. The camp was in Maine, not too far up into that state, and we were headed for Arlington, Massachusetts, where we were living with Aunt Fawny and her children.
Our travels took us along the seashore for a considerable distance, first the coast of Maine, then the small amount of New Hampshire shoreline, and finally the ocean north of Boston. Throughout the journey I clamored to get out and go swimming in the ocean, but it was rainy almost the whole way.
My mother promised, though, that if the rain stopped we could go swimming. Finally, when we were nearly home in Arlington, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. Filled with camp spirit I let out a cheer: “Two, four, six, eight; Who do we appreciate; God! God! God!”
My mother thought this was very cute and told it to all her friends. One of them wrote it up and sent it to The New Yorker, which published it. When Mother died I found that December 1933 copy of The New Yorker among her possessions.
Kinda neat. The cartoon happened to be on that page. Curiously, in TNY’s version, my dad’s name was Roger and it was ice cream he wanted, not a swim. Doesn’t matter to the punchline but I’ll always wonder if the details got lost in transmission, or some editor needed to assert his [presumably, in that era] power.
From Chemgal:
She notes, “I know phase changes, and expect someone else will immediately understand the bouba and kiki part, but I do not.”
Not sure “immediately” is the operative term, but it did sound vaguely familiar; Google finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, now alles klar. Even more interesting is searching “kiki bouba english”, which reveals that it’s not just an English phenomenon, although it does vary somewhat.
Oh, and hovertext is:
Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.
Jack Applin sends:
He asks, “Is the carrot implying that he eats only carrots, and that the donut eats only donuts? So Billy is a cannibal? Or, does Billy only eat other Billys? Why would either of those possibilities bother a talking carrot who is a cannibal himself?”
From Irv:
He comments,
The second and third frames in the second row are what IDU. If the Wizard is cheating, shouldn’t the beam and hangers be visible there as well as in the last frame? Otherwise, maybe he is cheating and conjures the beam and hangers to “prove” he wasn’t using magic in the previous frames even though he was? All told, IDU what’s going on here.
For that matter, if there’s some magic making the beam and hangers invisible that he somehow forgets? turns off? for the last frame, how did he appear to lift it off the ground??
I think there’s something here about heartstrings, but I can’t quite make it work:
I’m sure y’all will set me straight!
BillR offers:
Came across this guy, Cameron Spires, who calls his strip Goat to Self. Most of his are borderline NSFW, or over the line, somewhat surrealistic, or just vague. Can’t figure this one out at all.
This editor posits that the key is that the dolphin (porpoise? beluga?) in the last panel is the defense lawyer, and the objection is to forcing self-incrimination. Mind you, I’m not sure that’s up to the defense lawyer — I think the witness has to invoke that themselves.
OK, I get the overall joke, but what’s with the “Colonel” bit? Is this something cruise companies do–try to flatter people with bogus titles? If so, I need to sign up for a better class of junk mail.
Just seems odd and not relevant to the overall joke. What say ye?
(I’ve lived a version of this joke: 35 years ago, my wife and I were living in a townhouse. We went for a walk on a Sunday and the end unit in our building was having an open house. “Hey, let’s go look”, she said, “I’ve always wanted to see one of those end units”. A couple of months later, I’m carrying boxes down the sidewalk between townhouses as we start our move…)
Comics I Don't Understand 