Category / (Not a Cidu)

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 23rd, 2021

Jan’s dating adventure continues. This seems to use a pun on an unspoken characterization.

And it is rather cute to think about how the cymbals can be incorporated into a password. Probably no more annoying than when the form has no way of communicating the legal symbols it will accept to your secure-random-password generator.

by EditorM

Minor Mysteries and Oopses

These are non-CIDUs or semi–CIDUs, where the joke or main point isn’t seriously in doubt, but some specifics of the writing or artwork seem somewhat off, or incomplete, or in need of explanation or correction. (Yet we don’t want to get into the territory of mockery or purely complaining.)

This first one is from Chak who calls it an Oops, and comments “The oopsies I’m thinking of are about well-drawn comics that slipped up”. In this Fastrack, the custom paperclip seems to change position without physical cause.:

Here was a Between Friends that seems to be illustrating a familiar saying with a situation that shows something different. In the picture, isn’t it more someone who has gone down and may not come back up?

The Far Side

We have been getting plenty of submissions or suggestions for The Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson, both classic and recent, some scanned from books and some copied off the 2019-established web site. Some suggestions were meant as classic solo-CIDU posts, but others might fit into one of these quasi-CIDU categories.

But there’s a big problem, that Larson has made a public point of his wish to not have his cartoons reprinted without permission and not under his control. There are people who doubt that this would have legal force if he tried to enforce it; but it doesn’t seem entirely right to defy the wishes of someone whose work we appreciate and want to enjoy.

So generally we have been responding to submissions and suggestions with a reminder of those constraints.

But thinking about Internet standards, short of copying and reposting something, and short also of the middle ground of embedding something by link, there is the fundamental WWW action of linking. That is well established as not infringing anything.

It’s also pretty inconvenient! Hard to have informed discussion threads when the item being commented on is not visible in the same window or tab! Still, it’s not beyond our abilities, CIDUers.

Sent in by Findus as an artwork/layout question rather than overall CIDU, this linked Far Side cartoon raises for them the question “what’s with the lovingly executed reflection in the mirror that is not a ‚mirror image‘? Is this intentional?”

And from Brian R we have this linked Far Side cartoon, which he suggested as a CIDU – but then understood fine the next day!

There actually is a certain amount of good sense to the now-classic bit about tech support asking “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?” as made famous by “The IT Crowd”. Now here in Lard’s World Peace Tips, it is cited in the wrong order. Is that the joke? Or was it accidental? Or intentional but supposed to be meaningful here, where the kite in the picture seems to be “off” since it is not flying, so is poised to be turned on, i.e., launched? My gosh that was long-winded!

Down the Garden Path Dept. Can you convince me this Loose Parts does not at all involve people getting squeaky voices from inhaling Helium?

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 17th, 2021

Sent in by J-L, who says “It involves Jon trying to trick Garfield into taking a pill, and how Garfield tries to frustrate Jon’s plans. My family laughed at this because recently we have been trying to feed a pill to our dog, Honey Bun.  While the first few times were successful (it was easy to hide the pill in some delicious food of some sort), eventually Honey Bun got wise to our efforts and would spit out the pill, no matter how delicious the food was.” We agree, it is good to see Jon getting the better of Garfield now and then.

In another main segment of the domestic companion-animal kingdom, here is a dog who knows a lot but not everything:

This RWO was sent in by Le Vieux Lapin, who says “An LOL? An OTW? At the very least it’s a bit more off the wall than I expect from Hilary Price.”

I was a bit dithery over whether it could be considered a CIDU. But if there is somebody not familiar with Tetris it might briefly be a CIDU for them; but would not hold up for a day’s discussion.

Although I saw immediately that it was doing Tetris, I didn’t catch that the word PETRIS was reflecting that there are domestic pets in the scene. I thought for a second that the PETR- was the key part, and was using the Greek-derived stem for “rock” or “stone” — so that the falling tetris pieces would turn out made of stone, and were on their way to a destructive crash. Nice relief that they are pets and end up cozily tucked in.

The Arnold Zwicky blog has remarked on this cartoon twice, once yesterday when it was reprinted ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2021/10/10/enduring-classics/ ) and once in 2010 when it first appeared ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/04/11/another-playful-portmanteau/ ) Zwicky seems surprised that people today are still quite familiar with Tetris, and that is the main subject of yesterday’s column. [Oh wait, I should be saying “last Sunday’s blog” not “yesterday’s”; though I am writing this bit on Monday 2021-10-11.]

The first two panels are so familiar as a turnabout joke, with a variety of particular punch lines, its nice to see Horace coming up with something different.

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 16th, 2021

I really like treating “erudite” as the name of a mineral. But don’t care for the supposed punch line here that was used to get that across and try to pun on the standard meaning.

by EditorM

Second-order synchros of LOLs

What I mean by “second-order synchronicity” is that Arthur was struck by two different synchro pairs on the same day.

“Barney & Clyde matches with MGG:”

“And Close To Home matches with Off the Mark:”

“Neither are exact matches, but both immediately caught my eye.”

by EditorM

Random: New Yorker non-contest non-captioned cartoons bit

Frequent CIDU contributor Ooten Aboot (aka “Canadian Raising Is Real”) sent for our enjoyment news of The New Yorker working to out-do themselves with a variant on their widely-beloved Caption Contest. It’s a series of drawings, mostly by their cartoon artists, and mostly lacking captions, presented online as a “Daily Shouts” humor feature.

The intro write-up, by Dahlia Gallin Ramirez, goes like this:

Once a year, a team of demons at The New Yorker provides “cartoons” in need of captions. You, the readers—so full of hope, so charmingly mortal—upset yourselves trying to think of jokes. There are no submissions, no finalists, and no votes, but there are winners: the evil beings who created these uncaptionable images. Good luck!

We can’t print here any pictures that are their current content, but here’s that link again!

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies and Minor Mysteries – LOLs and Semi-CIDUs, October 10th, 2021

Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Minor Mysteries

These are comics that somebody thought were pretty good, or even full LOL, and not baffling but a little hard to pin down. Like, you can think of a rather plausible explanation of the chuckle — or maybe two! — but there’s nothing that clinches the case that *this* or *that* just has to be the key to what’s going on.

For example, with something like this Andertoons, we might think of the minor mystery as expressed in terms of providing the missing caption. Is it about the odd feeling you’re being watched? Or more like “Oh, where did I set down my glasses?”. It could be either, do you agree?

A Minor Mystery from Darren, who says “I can’t tell if Watson’s jarns need to be interpreted as a specific term.  I’m flummoxed.  Apparently the squirrel is as well?”

Okay, the joke here is that the threatened punishment will involve a cannister vacuum cleaner (in what seems to be a photo clip?) rather than a conventional physical beating or the like. But it’s an unanswerable mystery just what the threat is. Torture by exposure to noisy motor, like a household pet? Being inhaled altogether? Having some portion of his body inhaled?