Category / (Not a Cidu)

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?

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 9th, 2021

Boise Ed recommends Doc Rat, and this Oy from the October 1 front page at Docrat.com.au was more available than others.

A CIDU-Oy of sorts, sent in by Usual John, who says “This is from Brevity, so it presumably is some kind of Oy, but I really don’t get it. I guess this is a version of Doc Holliday, but why is he offering to be my huckleberry?”

And indeed Brevity is generally going to yield up some species of OY, as here:

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 3rd, 2021

under the remaining five red baidagko

The last few weeks I’ve felt that Wrong Hands has been a bit off their best form. But this one seems a good case of returning to their former standard.

So here is another Wrong Hands, sent in by Philip, who notes that as an Oy it would be tripartite. (Have we seen this one before?)

I have never sat down on a cat …. that did not immediately make the situation known! :-)

Six of one, half-dozen of the other, sent by Phil Smith III

(Also adding in another Condron as he was unfamiliar to me.)

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 2nd, 2021

Arrgh, they just missed the chance to pun it off against serialism, the academic successor to atonal or twelve-tone music as a body of theory and compositional practice. To boot, cerealism and serialism are pronounced identically, while surrealism is distinguishable! Well OY to that, or indeed ARRRGH!

This time the squirrel does have something to say — and he’s clearly wrong.

Here’s an Oy-Ewww. Wait, do I know the actual etymology? And how’s about “steak tartare”?

by EditorM

Bonus: Estamos texting todo el tiempo

(Or as Google Translate would put it: Nosotros estamos enviando mensajes de texto todo el tiempo.)

Our recent foray into the Baldo translation mysteries included an interesting subthread on whether the Spanish seemed to reflect any particular national-origin variety of the language (or since the setting is in the U.S. , there might be contemporary U.S.-regional varieties at play ) , or rather a textbook or generic Western Hemisphere compromise variety of the language. Also in question was “official, standard” language versus slang and colloquial.

Last week’s and this week’s strips provide a wealth of material bearing on those issues. The teen characters are doing a lot of texting, so we get to see the handling of such matters as: standard texting abbreviations; spontaneous abbreviations or “shorthand”; accidental typos, and bad autocorrect and autocomplete insertions; and intrusion of English terms instead of “official” Spanish. Thus for OMG they stick with OMG in the Spanish context, though I think elsewhere I’ve seen DM (for Dios mío not in this case Direct Message); and “texting” in both English and Spanish versions.

(Two wordless strips depict a deepening of the romantic jealousy crisis.)

(For anyone paying close attention to the dates, there were strips over the weekend that were not part of this series.)

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, September 26th, 2021 

This Bliss is something of an LOL-Eww.

Sent in as a LOL or semi CIDU-LOL by Chak, who asks “And do we think the bowling bag is important here?”

How annoying, to be mis-speciesed!

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, September 19th, 2021

Ah, so young to be falling into the essence of Meta!

Cul de Sac
Mannequin on the Moon

And thanks to Shamie F who sent it in and says: “I think it has something to do with a flying cup looking for a flying saucer. If that’s the whole point then OY!  I’m thinking I must be missing something though.” We think the default tag here would be LOL moreso than OY (a flying saucer is called that just because of resemblance to an ordinary saucer), but how does the gang weigh in on the “is that all there is?” factor?

Adult Children
Tomversations

Here’s one from BillR:

Sp;eedbump
Andertoons

Very smart to use Peter’s name – the others are more easily identifiable.

But on the griping side of things, the wolf I think did not emerge a winner from any of their encounters. Maybe it depends on versions of the stories.

Thanks to Michelle for this LOL bit of pained irony:

Batch Rejections
And a LOL from Michelle:
In the Bleachers
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