Author / EditorM

by EditorM

“Papa Knows” at Obscurity of the Day

The estimable Allan Holtz, comic strip historian and proprietor of The Stripper’s Guide, has invited CIDU readers to join in trying to make sense of these example panels from the vintage series Papa Knows. He provides an historical deep-dive and some interpretive overview in last Friday’s blog column, in the Obscurity of the Day series, but leaves these four as examples where it seems no genuine attempt at a gag can be found. — What we like to call Comics I Don’t Understand!

(As Allan explains, “Obscurity of the Day is just posts about rare and overlooked newspaper comics; generally speaking if they’re hard to understand it’s because of the gulf between our time and theirs. Papa Knows, on the other hand, seems to be downright weird no matter when you might have read it!”)

by EditorM

Just Janis?

Janis is here without her Arlo, but the cartoon is heading for what we’d have to call Arlo territory in the CIDU sense!

I thought farmer’s daughter’s tan a clever play on the familiar farmer’s tan but wasn’t sure what the intended extended meaning was or whether it has anything to do with farmer’s daughter jokes. But I thought it might help to establish it was a nonce coinage by pointing to many standard dictionary entries for farmer’s tan and the absence of any for farmer’s daughter’s tan. But couldn’t find any of even the former! But at the last minute, at least Urban Dictionary turns up with an entry for farmers tan!

by EditorM

Bonus post: You know we’ll have a good time then

Charming vision for the remembering the song.

But forgive the intrusion of an I-don’t-understand element — is there something that makes Harry B recall and want to memorialize Harry C’s song, on this particular date and in this way? Or at any rate, is there meant to be something funny here? (Besides, of course, the normal cartoon non-realities of high-communication musical animals.)

And in case anyone needs a reminder of this song, here is a clip with some family memories followed by a live performance.

by EditorM

Terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t speak English!

Think of this as a followup to our thread from last December about Searle’s Chinese Room problem. However, the cartoon there came from the Daily Nous site, where everything is supposed to be philosophy (or usually institutional news); this one graced the pages of GoComics.

How lucky that the randomly-generated sounds coming from Man2 actually constituted correct directions to the Post Office!

But how unlucky, as Man1 actually wanted to go to the metro!

by EditorM

DUST

Is the joke just that there are social distinctions even among these kinds of items? Or is there an aspect that “dustbin” might be more of a British-sounding term and thus carry some cachet for those American cans?

Featured image (at top): “The dust-heaps, Somers Town, in 1836.” From an engraved wood print, circa 1880.
From this UC Santa Cruz site, about Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (whose early drafts reportedly were titled Dust).

by EditorM

Hagar meets some hooligans

The only joke I can fish out of this might be that we are supposed to know that the kids’ parents are sitting right there in the bar. But that might depend on us recognizing them as regular characters and knowing their families … a bit more than I can muster.

Or are the kids a crossover or tribute from another strip?? Wasn’t there a classic with “Hooligan” in the title? Oh, never mind.