Thanks to Usual John, for suggesting this one, and also for alerting us that D.D. Degg’s column at The Daily Cartoonist had a look at this strip , and very courteously linked to us when he applied the phrase “Comic I Don’t Understand” to this ThatABaby.
All right — Why Dagwood? Do you think he is known for Frisbee mishaps?
Why is this not a CIDU? Because it clears up when you realize that named artist is real, and learn even the first thing about them. Here’s Wikipedia: ” Lucio Fontana was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He’s known as the founder of Spatialism and exponent of abstract painting as the first known artist to slash his canvases – which symbolizes an utter rejection of all prerequisites of art.”
Diamond Lil departs from their pun-a-day usual practice, and gives us a nicely planned meta.
A well-executed entry in the own-petard category.
Featured Image (at top)
Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1965
Lucio Fontana
This “Barney & Clyde” strip was submitted by Usual John:
I think the gag is that the strip itself does not have (and does not need) a gag, but I’m sure there are other possible explanations.
I went hunting to see if there were any other worthwhile April Fools’ strips, but was sorely disappointed. Almost all of the “standard” setups simply showed one character playing a typically lame practical joke on someone else. The best strips were those few that elevated the humor with some sort of “meta” component. Here are a few examples:
(I especially liked this “Thatababy” strip because this year, my daughter decided to rearrange the silverware drawer as an April Fools’ joke. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, because we all just assumed that she had forgotten the usual arrangement.)
The last two examples are from the great Comic Strip Switcheroo (1-Apr-1997):
P.S. Feel free to embed your own favorite April Fools’ comics in the comments!
A nice Thurber shout-out here. And do you agree the Bliss dogs bear a resemblance to Thurber dogs?
And for fun let’s compare the color version:
I’d say the color is nicer as a mild-humor comic, but the Thurber book identity is obscured.
But no, I can’t figure out what the pairings and lines are doing. It’s certainly not the standard March Madness sort of bracketting. Maybe if I had reread the book at some point in the last 50 years I would do better. … OK, here’s a help page. Wait, how can it fail to mention Dorothea’s nickname, “Dodo”?
Oh, oh, oh! I think I know!
Have you heard about the notorious guy who had secret families in multiple places on his travel schedule? By the time he was found out, he had fathered enough kids to be called in the tabloids The 21-Son Galoot.
And from that same Wayno plus his senior partner, Dan Piraro in Bizarro:
They tell you where the answer can be found.
Before consulting that official answer, as a regular Luann reader but not a long-long-term fan, I was able to decode many of the individual clues, but could not give it an overall meaning. How will CIDU readers do, on either level?
All the individual clues decode to the same thing.
It’s a number
At first sight, this was going to be a CIDU. Then it was agreed to be not that puzzling — still, it’s not perfectly clear if it’s just a funny situation idea.
Say, what actually was the reason for Cmdr. Bond’s preference? Do the components get more evenly mixed, or less? Does some air get incorporated? Does it bring out the flavoring of the vermouth? Or hide it?
A geezer theme for sure.
An interesting kind of Meta, that we are flatfootedly calling “LOL-Meta, alluding to an old joke, by forestalling it”. Possibly a CIDU for a few — if you don’t already know what the patient’s question had to have been, by all means venture an idea of it in comments.
Okay, do you agree this belongs in the LOLs? Or would you put it in OY, because the patient’s mishearing error depended on a near-miss similarity of sound between urine and hearing?
Thanks to Chak for this LOL from the Chuckle Bros:
When the New Yorker website has an outage, you see this message.
Hey, just a minute there! Are you saying there’s something wrong with that? It strikes me as an eminently reasonable basis for a preference.
Here is a sampler from recent episodes of an Australian strip that is new on our radar, Insanity Streak by Tony Lopes.
An Awww:
Ooops, accidental repeat! This was already here in the OY list, when the Lard came along and triggered the Thursday quasi-synchronicity post. And we forgot to delete this occurrence.
There was a “Save the Naugas” movement! (Was that the Car Talk bros? Um, no, they were doing “Save the Skeets”.)
Here in the mid-South Side neighborhood around the University of Chicago, we think of this fabled pair as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-Park.
Thanks to Chemgal for sending in this Frazz, a good combo OY/LOL.
For what happens if you mix probiotics and antibiotics, see https://xkcd.com/2177/
Hey, what an interesting odd combo of meta and straight-up OY!
Thanks to Boise Ed for sending in this excellent Mutts, and for calling it a “fifth wall” cartoon!
Comics I Don't Understand 