Tag / Barney & Clyde

by multipleciduers

Wearing (out) of the green

A general note of remembrance for the holiday of green beer and green Chicago River.

The first two are holdovers from last week, when we had other things a-posting and didn’t remark Saint Padraic’s Day on CIDU main feed. A few helpful readers posted St Patrick’s Day jokes to the thread for that day, thank you for renewing the principle of thread drift!

This one was sent in by BillR, looking for what the gag is. It provoked a good discussion behind the scenes of CIDU, where we soon enough agreed on the intended gag but remained divided on whether some terminology was being misapplied!

(For the tag-watchers [or actually, category], yes this post is marked both CIDU and not-a-CIDU. Those just apply to different cartoons, that’s all.)

by zbicyclist

Beware the Ides of March!

Beware the Ides of March! We all know that phrase, but it seems odd that it has crept into the language, since we know few other facts about Roman history. The meaning of “Ides” is a bit confusing to us in the modern world, as these comics show.

Interestingly, the Ides of March were notable in Rome as a deadline for settling debts.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, February 19th, 2023

Here are two from dollarbill (and a third one we happened upon) with the 4th-wall or meta- theme of characters knowing they’re living in a cartoon. He mentions he has been “wading through J. C Duffy‘s humongous almost daily blog posting of comic/photos/short musings beside them sometimes,” which go back years. “Fusco Brothers is just one of his outputs.  The number of fly-in-the-soup  variations is staggering.” CIDU has sometimes featured Duffy’s Lug Nuts, somehow strikingly different in graphics appearance yet very recognizably his work.

Does this make you feel like Dark Side of the Horse is by now influencing successor generations?

Although most cats manage without mechanical mousetraps.

by EditorM

The Pillsburys on the TWSS trope

Okay, I get the general plot of how they’re both mutually surviving (or evading) some sort of sincerity tests. But no, what is the role of the TWSS trope? Is it a save? But in panel 2 it seems, on the contrary, to deepen the trouble, since Lucretia seems not to know the trope … or does she? But in panel 5 she provides a perfect set-up line for the trope as comeback, so she must know it. (And BTW what in fact is the bit about Fiddler getting at? What / how much is the supposed quote?)

I was going to attribute the original TWSS pattern to somebody, but didn’t know who. The entry at dictionary.com includes a surprisingly discursive article illustrating the usage and tracing the origins, after providing the basic compact definition: “That’s what she said is a form of innuendo that takes innocent statements out of context and makes them sound lewd or sexual.” They first find it in a 1973 book, which however calls it an ancient one-liner.

by EditorM

Firsts

This is the “Semi-CIDU” marked for this post. It’s Cynthia’s friend who says “Lots of firsts that day” but mostly it was Cynthia herself experiencing those firsts.

BTW, what do you think of the drawing techniques used to show us the girls are their younger selves in the last two panels?

[This was a Friday strip. The Saturday strip that follows continues the flashback, and gives an explicit answer to the Semi-CIDU question we posed; so we’re withholding that one until people have had a chance to comment on this post, and then will put it in comments.]

Bonus Barney. This is the “CIDU only because of a cultural reference you may not already know” marked for this post.

If you’re familiar with the story of Boggs, do you think the summary in the fourth panel is seriously in need of some amplification/clarification?

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – December 3rd, 2022

Let’s see, where is the checkbox for category “Food Neurosis Puns”?

The reader sending in this Barney & Clyde wrote: Heh heh, she said “stern”!

Vintage Funky from this week, recycled from when it was a gag strip.

Callback to Bizarro’s “Casual Frida” from October?

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – November 12th, 2022

And here’s another Lard for you for this week!

I wanted to say something like “This is not just a pun, but etymologically correct!”. It turns out something like that is justified, but not quite so simple and direct. Both Etymonline and Dictionary.com recognize a verb maze or amaze meaning “to daze, perplex, or stupefy” or “overwhelm or confound with sudden surprise or wonder,” but seem unclear on how it is related to the noun meaning  “labyrinth, baffling network of paths or passages” . But yes, it is related, some way.

Oh gosh, and here’s this entry mazy (adj.) “like a maze, winding, intricate,” 1570s, from maze (n.) + -y (2).! Brings back writing a paper on Book 9 of Paradise Lost, full of narrative about “the mazy serpent”.

The pun is not new, but as an oldie it is a goody!

Truss didn’t make it as prime minister long enough to outlast a head of lettuce, or the lead time for this comic.