Category / CIDU

by EditorM

“Please help with understanding the Spanish”? — No, please help with understanding the humor!

Very considerate of the English captioning to inform us these are tamales, which is not mentioned in the Spanish, and may not have been that obvious. In panel 2, invierno means winter, but I’m glad to learn that it might be a way Spanish speakers refer to what Anglophone North America calls “the holidays” or “the holiday period”. 

But the crux of the puzzlement is in the final panel. We have the material for a pun, in partial split meanings: masa by itself can mean dough, and masacre written solid would be the obvious massacre, or as Google Translate for some reason prefers, slaughter. But we have to ask, if there are fluent or native Spanish speakers here, does this work for you as a joke?

by Kilby

A Nasal Asynchron-Ewwwcity

There’s nothing very mysterious about this Wallace the Brave strip (it does help to be familiar with Spud’s somewhat odd personality):


However, that strip reminded of a “Win, Lose, Drew” comic from mid-December:


I seriously doubt that Drew Litton was referring to a specific player, but most of his comics do refer to current sports events. Were there an unusual number of overly “picky” offsides penalties this year? Or was there some other football incident to which this comic is referring?

by EditorM

Identifies as a Colt

Thanks to Boise Ed for sending this in, and affirming that the surface joke is puny but obvious. (That this exec is trying to hold the mascot responsible for the team’s poor performance.)

But then, what kind of a mascot is that, anyway? The writing says Colts, twice, but the costume is a bird. Red because Cardinal? Sharp beak because Raven? Is that confusion a reason the poor thing has failed to energize the fans, and they in turn have failed to energize the players? 

by EditorM

1.5 words per hand??

Thanks to Jack Applin for sending this in, and starting the debate on tattoo strategy!

As Jack suggests, and the CIDU team agrees, there has to be a mistake and the word “tattooed” should be outside the quotation marks. Still, that leaves a lot of text to fit. ”Also, ‘hands’, plural? Does he want the phrase duplicated on each hand, or two words on one hand, and the rest on the other?” The companion’s remark about fingers suggests the “Night of the Hunter” strategy…

P.S. For more examples of cinematic knuckle-tattooing, see this Guardian bit.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 14th, 2024

Zippy feeling just a bit meta.

And a semi-CIDU for this same couple:

The question being: Is the guy just pushing his point by selecting a random term meant to be absurd, or else do they maybe have something (like a remote, or an ashtray, …) which is actually crafted to look like a Stegosaurus?

Why not start off Sunday with a bit of math? Roughly how old is she?

This is Frazz’s Sunday intro panel for January 7th. Mallett posts these on Facebook. Otherwise, I’d never see them because GoComics doesn’t use the intro panels, for reasons I don’t understand.

by Kilby

One order of ’shrooms, please.

It’s fairly clear what is happening in each of the visible portions of this Perry Bible Fellowship comic, but I really don’t understand the sequence of events between the second and third panels:


I’m pretty sure that the man in the second panel is the same as the one in the background of the third panel, but if was he the one who called 911, how did he manage to escape the “choice”? And what is the EMT on the sidewalk trying to communicate with her hands?

by Kilby

What’s in a Name?


This Ink Pen rerun from February 2010 just happened to appear on New Year’s Day 2024. I can recognize the cartoon sources for all of the names mentioned by Hamhock, but I can identify only one of Ralston’s examples (the last one: “Goolagong“). I assume that most of the rest would yield relatively quickly to a concerted Internet search, but that’s not what I want to know. Is this a “geezer” and/or “millennial” issue? How many of those twelve names in the first three panels are obvious to the rest of you?

by EditorM

Uppsa! (Awww)

I guess it’s mostly an Awwww. But then, some questions are raised but not answered. Mainly, what’s the joke? Between panels 2 and 3 it changes from two pairs of tracks to one pair — is it meant to be a puzzle, solved by the reveal in panel 4 that one skater is now carrying the other. 

Also: In the first panel, are all the skates drawn correctly facing the way they are going (or are the red ones wrong)? Where we see two pairs of tracks, are they equally skillful or is one more wobbly? In the final panel, are the tracks especially wobbly, and is that sort of the joke?