Category / CIDU

by phsiii

It’s…magic??

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??

by Kilby

Logical Impossibilities

I have been following Leigh Rubin’s “Rubes” comics for at least a decade, or possibly two. I have to admit that it only rarely provokes an audible laugh, but it is virtually always worth a good smile. It is precisely this dependability that makes it all the more noticeable when a “Rubes” comic just doesn’t work, such as this one:

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Simply telescoping two concepts into one term doesn’t always produce a meaningful (nor humorous) result. The whole point of the “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment is “observability”. In this drawing we can see both the cat and the damage, so there cannot be any quantum (or “cat-tum”) superposition.

I had even more trouble with this second comic, which I would like to call “Stooge Trek“:

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Nobody would ever claim that anything that The Three Stooges ever did was “logical”, but Spock’s reaction (and dialog) seems completely out of place (even more illogical than the picture he is watching). For me, this comic just doesn’t work; YMMV.

P.S. Given the similarity of the hair styles of Moe and Spock, perhaps it would have been funnier to have a second frame, in which Spock pokes Kirk in the eyes.

P.P.S. I initially thought that the “dual nose poke” tableau seemed gratuitously excessive, but I was clearly wrong, as proved by this picture:

by Kilby

Dog Tuba

Boise Ed submitted this Bizarro as a CIDU, commenting: “The left man can barely hear the tuba, so the right man must be playing it very softly (which is hard to do). ‘Dog tuba’ reads like it’s the dog’s tuba, but he obviously doesn’t like the sound of it, even at that very soft volume. Beyond that, I’m stumped here.“

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P.S. I think it’s clear that this is a play on “dog whistle“, but for CIDU purposes, let’s assume that Wayno was merely referring to the physical device, and not to the political context. Even with that hint, it’s not entirely clear why or even whether this is funny.

by Kilby

Artwork Failure

Brian in StL suggested this Baby Blues strip two years ago as a partial CIDU, commenting: “The joke is obvious, but what I and everyone in comments noticed is that the front passenger seat is open, so why does he need to ride on the roof? I guess it might be a better question of how the cartoonist could have done the strip to make more sense. Possibly a pile of packages on the seat, bumped out of the back by the tree?“

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P.S. I agree with Brian, the artwork makes absolutely no sense at all. An alternative option (besides “packages”) would be to put one of the kids in the front seat, so that half of the back seat could be folded down to provide room for the tree (that is exactly what I do every year when my son and I go out to the local “cut your own tree” lot). However, Brian’s solution would probably have been easier to draw convincingly.

by Kilby

Bonus: Tenacious persistence

GiP submitted this B.C. strip, which doesn’t really fit into any category. It’s not funny enough for an LOL, and not puzzling enough for a CIDU: all the gag says is that Thor is hard-headed: he’s willing to endure any adversity to catch his fish, including unnecessarily repetitive waves in the first two panels, and ridiculously improbable starfish slapstick in the third panel. Even the destruction of his boat did not deter him.

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I wonder what Clumsy Carp would have thought about this.

P.S. Despite all its weaknesses, here’s a B.C. re-run from exactly two years ago:

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Why the re-run? Discovering this strip in the submissions archive reminded me of a comment that Bill Bickel wrote in May, 2020, and attached to “Dynamo” (01-Jan-2023): “So greetings from Month Three of the Coronavirus Lockdown. I hope everybody made it through okay to the other side.“

Alas: no.

by Kilby

Hound Dogs

Mark. H. suggested this Mother Goose & Grimm a partial CIDU, commenting: “Grimmy tries to encourage the dog singing the song. But the song is not about the singer – it’s about the one the singer is singing to (‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…‘). The singer might very well have caught a rabbit himself, but that wouldn’t change the song.“

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Is it really just as simple as Grimmy mistaking the subject? Should I have added this to the Sunday Funnies, instead?