Category / LOL

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 29th, 2024 

Boise Ed suggested this venerable “For Better or for Worse” strip (from 1993), commenting: “This one really warmed the cockles of my heart (and I have no idea where that idiom came from).“

…
P.S. Ed didn’t give it a category, he called it “just sweet“, so I’ve added an “Awww” tag.

The New York Times has a Flashback quiz, which asks you to place 8 historical events in chronological order. The New Yorker has now started Laugh Lines, in which you are asked to put some New Yorker cartoons in chronological order. Here’s one:

https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/laugh-lines/no-2

I haven’t tested to what extent these are available to non-subscribers. The cartoon version would seem impossible, but there’s usually a clue to some event (e.g. the word “Obama”).

This one popped up at the end when I finished:

And now a few more Christmas LOL’s / Awws:

Danny Boy send this cutie in: “The pets’ fondness for a “little pink sock” is a running trope. But then the pairing of sock/stocking is I guess “the joke””

And a few holiday entries:

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 22st, 2024

Jack Applin submitted this “Edison Lee” last year as a CIDU, but Comics Kingdom refused to produce it, until I remembered to change the URL from the old “.net” to the new “.com” address. Ooops.

…
Jack commented: “Sure, the Rankin/Bass special. But what’s this about a finger in a nose? It wouldn’t BE in the special, if he were edited out.”

The humor is mostly just slapstick, but “nose” is probably a reference to the line in “The Night Before Christmas” (and the elf just messed up while “…laying his finger aside of his nose“).

Speechless Santa. Fill in your own dialogue. (GoComics posting error on 12/15. It’s clearly a GoComics error, because Arcamax shows the dialogue. GoComics corrected the error a day later.) It’s oddly meta, because panel 3 in the actual dialogue accuses Santa of not keeping up with the latest technology.

Steve B. sends this in. “Thought this was clever. Not sure everyone will get this if they don’t pay attention to the news.”

Mark H. send this in, noting “It took me a while”.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 15th, 2024

Squirrel(s) have taken up residence in the attic of our condo building. Between the animal control fees, the carpentry repairs where they chewed through a dormer, and trimming the trees further away from the building, this will be an expensive endeavor. And, I have neighbors who scare away the red-tailed hawk who hangs around, so it won’t harm the squirrels. Seeing that squirrel in Whamond’s strip reminds me of a tagline of Bill’s: “GoDaddy and the Squirrel Must Both Die”.

Even in this very early Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown has found his signature style.

When you want to make sure nobody will send your comic in as a CIDU:

This is a combination Public Service Announcement and Christmas gift suggestion. My runner daughter started wearing a fiber-optic vest with chest light like Frazz is wearing a few years ago, and then got me one as a Christmas gift. They’re great for running, cycling, or walking at night. As a driver, I appreciate people who are lit up, so I can see them far ahead.

by Kilby

Bonus: Macanudo Misfires, Too

Macanudo has been extremely dependable since I started following it several years ago: whimsical, sometimes poignant, but often surreal (and occasionally CIDU). Like Rubes, this makes it all the more noticeable when a strip just doesn’t work, like this one:

…
The slapstick “flattening” might have worked if the strip had ended at the third panel (shifting “Are you OK?” into the second dialog balloon), but including the partner’s desperation and anguish in the fourth panel transforms the remnant of humor into a simple tragedy, leaving nothing to laugh at or feel good about. Thankfully, the hiatus was just for one day.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 8, 2024

Radio has certain requirements. Sports announcing, too. Dead air is the enemy. Some of the most painful examples to me are long bicycle races (4+ hours) that end in a sprint stage. So until the last kilometer, not much is going on if there’s no breakaway. But 4 hours must be filled with announcing, regardless. Particularly painful if there’s only one announcer, not two.

A quick look around my dwelling shows 6 books that I’m partway through but intend to finish, a couple of which I haven’t make any progress on in at least a year. (Not counting ones I don’t intend to finish, or haven’t started.) Should I invoke a statute of limitations on these 6?

The New Yorker has posted a page of the magazine’s cartoons which were most liked on Instagram.

This one pairs nicely with Parisi’s one above.

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?“

…
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 multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 01st, 2024

Mark H. submitted this 9CWL strip last year as a “Geezer Alert” (and partial CIDU), asking: “Does anyone younger than 60 know about Jimmy Hoffa?” (The CIDU and/or puzzle component is to figure out what she might have said to him underwater.)

…
P.S. It is so refreshing to post a Chickweed Lane strip that is not (automatically) “Arlo” material.

This was going to be a CIDU, but it seems to be a colorist error. That’s not a basketball, but a curled up armadillo. But they don’t change color when they curl up, so far as I know.

From Wikipedia: “When threatened by a predator, Tolypeutes species frequently roll up into a ball. Other armadillo species cannot roll up because they have too many plates. When surprised, the North American nine-banded armadillo tends to jump straight in the air, which can lead to a fatal collision with the undercarriage or fenders of passing vehicles.”

Usual John sends this one in. This gets a bit of s “Eww”

The previous one in this series is pretty good, too.

by Kilby

After Thanksgiving is before Thanksgiving

This cartoon by John Jonik was first published in the New Yorker exactly 41 years ago today, but I discovered it too late to add it to the Thanksgiving collection for 2023.

…
The headline above is modeled after a quote by Sepp Herberger, coach of the German national football soccer team: “After the game is always before the [next] game.” Of course, discussing football (of either variety) can sometimes be even more explosive than discussing politics.

Mark H. submitted this XKCD (#2858) last year; although it did get embedded in comments (such as in the No-Politics Zone), it’s still worth a repeat in a post:

…
P.S. The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.“

P.P.S. The link to the HuffPost article in the second panel still works (I already typed it in, so that you don’t have to).

…
In Germany, it’s called “Erntedankfest” (literally: “harvest thanks festival”), and is celebrated on the first Sunday in October, but it is primarily an event for the liturgical calendar (both Catholic and Protestant), and is not (generally) celebrated by families at home.

…
Several decades ago, my grandmother just happened to include a leftover bowl of (homemade) mac&cheese on the Thanksgiving dinner table, which resulted in some amused needling from my dad and uncle. However, both my sister and my aunt vigorously defended it, so that for many years thereafter, (fresh) mac&cheese became a standard component of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu.

…
The final panel reminded me of the last scene in the song “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.

No cranberries? Frank and Ernest have suggestions:

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, November 24th, 2024

Boise Ed submitted this B.C. strip as a CIDU, but I think it qualifies as an LOL:

…
Ed had questioned the illogical elements of the setup: “I had forgotten that there is a restaurant chain called ‘The Cheesecake Factory‘, but why would anyone only eat roadkill, and why would anyone drive his car through that restaurant?“, but I think that it’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just supposed to be funny. The latter is something that the current author(s) don’t always achieve, so it’s always nice to see an exception.

MarkTa submitted this Wizard of Id strip as a CIDU quite a while ago, asking “Please help – is it about flatulence? Completely baffled.“

…
While “burrito” might indeed imply “flatulence“, the real explanation is simpler: the Wizard is tired of Blanche stealing the blankets, and is anchoring them on his side of the bed (with an ultra-modern medieval nail gun). Both Calvin and his dad would have appreciated the Wizard’s solution:

When a cat employs this blanketing strategy, the result is called a “purrito“:

by Kilby

Bonus: Synchronous Flushes

Brian in StL submitted this pair of “classic crescent-moon outhouses” last year, which seemed eminently appropriate for World Toilet Day.

…
P.S. Both of these strips were published last year on October 5th, but the Non Sequitur is actually a rerun from 2019, and was embedded into a comment in that year in Bill’s Halloween post about “Outhouses“.