Another from jmcandrew: “This is a Jack Ziegler cartoon and other than the fact that there is likely not a lot of demand for poet laureates in most corporations I have no idea what the joke here is supposed to be.”
Agreed. Though it does sound like a pretty sweet gig.
from jmcandrew, who asks, “Does this qualify as a geezer comic now for people who remember when long distance communication was prohibitively expensive?”
See, kids, back in the day…ok, yeah, definitely geezer alert time.
I collect what I call “obsolete jokes”: jokes that are no longer funny because technology—not the Zeitgeist—has passed them by. (The latter are common–consider most political humor, whose half-life is often quite short.)
One of these jokes involves a family eating dinner; the phone rings and the maid answers. She listens, says “Sure is!” and hangs up. A minute later it rings again, same story. After the third time, the master of the house asks her, “What’s with the phone calls?” and she explains, “Some joker keeps calling, saying ‘Long distance from New York’!”
One thing I particularly enjoy about these is the often multiple layers of obsolescence. For example with this one we have: family eating together; landline; maid (!); and of course the actual punchline.
From jmcandrew:
Is there a joke here other than this restaurant has chosen to display a single piece of pie in their window instead of an entire pie? Is it controversial for senior women to enjoy banana cream pie?
Thanks to jmcandrew, who wonders, “Why canoes? Is it unusual that someone who did this sort of activity would own 4 canoes? Is this a reference to something else?“
Indeed. It appears Hat Guy has a canoe detector, and…what?
(For extra credit, explain what canoes have to do with oceans)
I tinkered with settings. Disabling “Enable blocks in comments” allows me to comment again. I did have to do a hard refresh (<cntrl><F5> in most browsers), so if it still doesn’t work for you, try that.
Hoping to see a comment from someone soon so I’ll know it’s working!
Adding a quote so we can see the styling both in post and in comments.
I got this on second or third read, but I don’t think it gets points for execution:
Mitch asked, “What is the soccer ball doing in there?” but once I got the overall point (such as it was), I see why it’s there.
Am I being overly critical here?
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.
Comics I Don't Understand 