I find it hard to believe that any newspaper editor would have let Get Fuzzy strip this appear in print, even if the relevant expression is a little bit dated:
… The last dialog bubble in the fourth panel is closer to overkill than actually necessary, but it certainly makes it clear that the joke in the third panel was intentional.
This Yuval Robichek comic was submitted as a “choice half-Arlo”, but in Bill’s day it would never have appeared on the primary CIDU site: he would have banned it to his separate “Arlo” page. (But since it is a web comic, it wouldn’t qualify for an Arlo “award”.)
… Most countries in the temperate zones have one 23-hour day every year’s calendar, but it falls in Spring, not in Winter.
… As opposed to both of the “Born Loser” strips, Frazz is referring here to net sunlight, rather than total duration.
P.S. Jef Mallett lives in Michigan, and must be very familiar with how short the days get in northern latitudes. On the other hand, Berlin is located ten degrees farther north than Detroit, so Mallett doesn’t have that much to complain about.
Of course, the shortest day of the year is followed immediately by the longest night:
Usual John submitted this Curtis as a possible Arlo candidate two years ago, commenting: “It’s interesting that Ray Billingsley managed to get this into print and, given that he isn’t known for testing the limits, maybe it was accidental“. I sincerely doubt that the author was aware of the definition to which John was referring, and the fact that the strip got published almost certainly means that his editor didn’t bother to look it up, either.
… For the [offensive slang] meaning, here is John’s link to “choad” in “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (warning: extremely NSFW for strong language, of course). For those who just want the meaning, without the coarse citations, Wiktionary also offers a listing for “choad“.
P.S. Besides the indeterminant nature of the Arlo intent, I think another reason why this strip didn’t get posted may be because the gag is sub-standard: the telescoped neologism isn’t really convincing, and there’s no explanation whatsoever as to why both boys suddenly shifted from laughing in the third panel to fighting in the fourth panel.
I had originally set Mark H.’s suggestion to appear on Valentine’s Day, but then Kilby used this comic in his post earlier today. All of this exposure proves that the text below is still relevant, so I’m posting it as a bonus for today.
Bill Bickel set up the Arlo Award tag to indicate comics that seem to have snuck in sexual references past a newspaper comic censor. Of course, the state of the newspaper business is such that comic censors, or copy editors in general, seem to be in short supply. Web comics are, of course, inedible (I mean ineligible) for an Arlo Award.
The award is a nod to Jimmy Johnson’s Arlo & Janis comic, which still has innuendos with some subtlety. But a special Arlo Lifetime Achievement Award has to go to Brooke McEldowney’s 9 Chickweed Lane.
Here’s one sent in by Mark H., who notes “Given that they’ve never been intimate, it’s not clear how she knows how big his macadamias are – except that, being a few years older, she probably baby-sat him in younger days.”
But, yes, McEldowney established 3 days earlier that they haven’t had, well, you know what.
So, with the tiny power invested in me as one of the editors of Comics I Don’t Understand, I hereby give 9 Chickweed Lane a Lifetime Arlo Achievement Award.
Carl Fink submitted this Hägar the Horrible strip, commenting: “I think this is way too obvious to actually be an Arlo. Is there a category for ‘The Funnies just showed a young couple having sex in front of their neighbors, only slightly off panel’?“
There are a series of fine distinctions related to CIDU Bill’s “Arlo” designation. Carl is absolutely correct in recognizing that this comic does not qualify for an “Arlo Award“, because there isn’t any hidden wordplay, and nothing has been secretly smuggled past the syndicate’s censors; the hot action is right there (to the left of the second panel), for all of us (not) to see.
Whether or not this is “Arlo material” is a matter of subjective opinion. There is nothing objectively offensive about two pairs of underwear, and especially not with such frumpy ones as shown here. I don’t think that even Bill would have thrown this comic into his “Arlo Page” purgatory, and he was especially careful about not wanting to offend even the most sensitive of CIDU readers.
Nevertheless, this example is surprisingly risqué for a syndicated comic, and all the more so for one published by King Features, which in my experience has always been the most “sanitized” of all the syndicates. It also shows that someone else (presumably Gary Hallgren, for lack of any official information) has taken over the writing duties for “Hägar”. I cannot imagine that Dik or Chris Browne would ever have produced a comic like this one (even if their name still appears on it).
If this strip (pun intended) didn’t trigger the KF-censors, then it’s probably because the editor decided that the “sex” is indefinite and unprovable: concerned parents could theoretically explain to their curious kids that the new couple have just changed into their pajamas (to go to Hägar’s bed). The duplicity is psychotic, but that’s the way Americans behave about this subject: remember the “wardrobe malfunction“?
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!
Comics I Don't Understand 