This comic is dated 2017 (before the CIDU server meltdown sometimes referred to as “comicgeddon”), but Bill must have retrieved it later for a new draft. The original song was released 68 years ago today, back when he was not quite half a year old.
This is a CIDU-Oy — is the joke merely in the polysemy of places? Or is there something special about the named cities, like if they all have Marathons and that’s how somebody is likely to break a leg?? Or nothing more? I don’t understand!
There is an excellent pun behind this, which requires just a bit of Disney to recognize. But then there is the sub-question of whether Liniers (the Macanudo creator) is coming up with it spontaneously on their own, or is making an allusion to 1960s U.S. avant-garde theater where a famous campus-set domestic melodrama of psychological cruelty used the pun as its title — as would be familiar to theater and movie fans of a certain age [geecoughzers!].
(BTW, de paso, here for completeness is the version in Spanish, which does not attempt to re-create the pun. Leaving the question, is there then any joke left at all?)
Cute enough!
Thanks to Boise Ed for this OY-CIDU from Lola:
The partial CIDU designation is occasioned by the surprisingly large number of GoComics commenters who aver they just don’t get it — even after putting together “Skip Recap”. Evidently not in the habit of watching serialized TV over a streaming service.
The squirrel’s comment was briefly puzzling. The drawing doesn’t look much like a bottle, nor a glass, so the “alcoholic beverages” reading of “spirits” was blocked. But that’s what it has to be, isn’t it?
Thanks to Mark H. for sending this, and calling for a Geezer Alert.
Oh, why not!
This one deserves to be flagged.
I’ve been following Mutts for decades; I really enjoy the artwork and its gentle and simple nature. Unfortunately, McDonnell frequently uses the strip to promote various “worthy” causes and ideologies. Although perhaps admirable, the campaign propaganda frequently damages the humor beyond repair.†
The Mutts strip shown here is one of (very) many in which McDonnell protests against the abusive habit of keeping dogs chained up, but it is notable for the excellent pun in the final panel. One minor detail that I find puzzling is the expression on Guard Dog’s face: I think that he should be smiling, or perhaps wincing.
P.S. † – One of the worst examples was a sequence in which the Fatty Snax Deli suddenly went “vegan”. I don’t think it has shown up again in the strip even once since that arc appeared.
This gets extra tags — some kinda Meta for not using the standard joke set up in panel 1, and some kinda Geezer warning for those youngsters who don’t see something familiar behind “Killjoy was here”.
Maybe. My local newspaper (Chicago Tribune) has become an indistinct shadow of its former self, and the comics are shrunken and in black and white.
Despite the “(Not a CIDU)” category applied to this post as a whole, this item may take a bit of concentration and research before you can join in saying “Oh, I’ve got it completely decoded now!”.
There will be no arguing over whether this is truly a “meta” comic!
We think this is a rerun; but if so, then it falls into “an oldie but goodie”.
Here’s the funny-sad one promised in the category tags.
BTW, do they have a walkie-talkie set, or is that a quite old-school cell phone?
[Note from 2023 reposting] No comics added as of this reposting. Comments from 2021 and subsequently are preserved. If the note and link at the bottom are a bit confusing, they lead back to a separate posting which was a different version of the Veterans Day Add-ons idea, and is still available in the archive and by that link, but is not herewith being reposted.
[Note from 2021 original posting] Cartoons with Veterans relevance that we recently ran across, or that CIDU Bill had saved to the site’s media library with a note for possible Veterans Day add-on use.
This one Bill marked “Nov 11 Veterans Day addon”. It was posted in https://cidu.info/2020/11/11/one-more-for-veterans-day/
This one Bill marked “UDIC Frazz Veterans Day” . It was posted as https://cidu.info/2018/11/09/udic/
These two we noticed on sequential days in Maria’s Day. Since that strip is on a reruns cycle at GoComics, the actual dates of the recent appearance were 31 August and 01 September, but apparently the original publication was on 10 and 11 November of some year.
There are more good ones that readers added in various years as comments to the original “Arlo’s Veterans Day” post (reposted earlier this morning). But here are others which got posted in various one-off’s at various times.
A very retro Beetle Bailey with a foreshadowing of Vietnam:
Camp Swampy may not ever have been a fighting base, but as this shows, they were not entirely outside a world where military conflict was a reality. And we can count all who served as veterans, whether or not they were in active combat or even in a war zone.
This strip seems to be dated 1964, and early enough in that year that “Viet Nam” did not yet mean all of what it would soon take on. Still, isn’t it a bit shocking that this might strike some of its audience as simply funny?
Interesting reader comments can be found attached to the 2020 posting of this.
Comics I Don't Understand 