Unca $crooge sends this one in, noting “This seems like two different conversations but maybe there is a connection that I don’t get.”
The Dinette Set is in reruns, so this could refer to some current event we’ve forgotten, although this comic didn’t tend to refer to current events.
It’s almost clear and obvious – turns out the loud / parent.disturbing / teen-typical music booming thru the speakers is not what Zack is listening to thru the already-donned headphones. Because instead, he is hearing. . . what, exactly?
I was going to say, it seems suggestive, but then turns out not. But is that an internal contradiction?
Sometimes the intent and joke are clear, but you have the feeling there is a tiny bit of disappointment over a detail that is wrong, or at any rate could be improved.
Don’t you want the first panel to say “take requests” instead of “play requests”?
All right, a good point to be making. But it takes too much work to confirm that the two structureless and unparseable series of terms differ only in the first position, where one has senior and the other junior. Why can’t the series be more varied? Say, throw in a deputy or associate or adjunct. Go ask the second second assistant director (actual title on some film crews).
This Wrong Hands doesn’t quite work for me (==mitch). But maybe that’s because I don’t have the same vowel in fraud and frog. Is it better for someone who does?
My complaint here is trivial but it doesn’t stop bothering me, and distracting from the joke. The Joker is ALWAYS wild. Many times he is not included in the game, sure, but that doesn’t make him non-wild.
I wanted to pair this with a Bizarro I saw making almost the same joke, and with almost the same problem. It had both a Joker and a 2, and seemed to again attribute the part-time wildness to the Joker; when there was the opportunity to instead use our knowledge that “Deuces wild” is one of those dealer’s-choice options that would serve to make the 2 sometimes wild and sometimes not! The trouble is, that Bizarro was the June 2023 page on an official Bizarro hanging calendar on my wall, hence not so easily downloadable.
Well y’know what? That’s not an insuperable problem …
And, seeing it again, I should retract the claim that this one gets it wrong too. Here the Joker sometimes doesn’t feel like being wild, but is condemned to wildness always; and he is envious of the therapist deuce, for whom wildness is a sometime thing.
Here are two suggestions from Targuman, not very similar except that in both getting the joke depends on catching a cultural reference. Not entirely a geezerish enterprise, either — yes, both have roots in the sixties or before, but at least one is still in use in contemporary “intellectual properties”.
“Andy”?? How about Johnny and Henry? (Okay, yes, we know why. But strictly speaking it’s a mistake.)
So, some confusion between Nirvana and reincarnation / transmigration of souls?
Thanks to Usual John for suggesting this and providing useful discussion.
How does the mention of the dino’s penguin diet prompt that change of mind about imminent danger? Of extinction? I don’t understand.
Usual John adds “Incidentally, but presumably not germane to the joke, armored dinosaurs like this one were usually herbivorous. I’m not sure what kind it is supposed to be (Johnny Hart probably did not know either, but he likely was basing it on a picture or museum specimen he had seen). Maybe a stegoceras? Not the better-known stegosaurus, since there is no thagomizer.”
“Note that this would have been before the current understanding that birds are modern dinosaurs was widely accepted and also before it occurred to anyone that (non-avian) dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid.”
Comics I Don't Understand 