Chemgal sends this in, as does billr as well.

Some might say making a joke this obscure really isn’t cricket.
Chemgal sends this in, as does billr as well.

Some might say making a joke this obscure really isn’t cricket.
Both Dirk the Daring and Targuman independently sent this one in, from Barney & Clyde last Monday.

“I don’t get and I don’t think anybody commenting on it gets it either. I follow the strip, and I read the strips that led up to this and I still don’t get it,” says one of our spotters. Well, here are those previous strips (from the preceding Friday and Saturday):


And as the other spotter puts it, “What does his age have to do with it? If we take today’s strip (Wed.) the only thing is perhaps ‘are we too young to date?’ Maybe.” Here is that follow-up from Wednesday (which is “today” at the time of setting up this post):

P.S. And one more strip on this same plot line:





And another Rubes, suggested by Maggiethecartoonist :





Should I feel sheepish posting a second comic on herding?
With considerable forethought, Chemgal sent this in when it appeared, last July!


There is a motherlode of Mothers Day cartoons from Foxtrot collected at their website, of which we will sample just a couple.
This first one was featured by Bill on CIDU in 2018:

This “Breakfast in Bedlam” strip seems to be from 2001:




MD gifts funded by allowance, a theme for Fox Trot, also features here in Calvin, 1989:



This resurfaced in this Saturday’s Counterpoint mailing, not where I’m used to seeing B&C.
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.)
Kilby writes:
I understand (and agree with) the first three panels, but the punchline in the fourth panel is a mystery to me.

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.





Andréa sends these in. Is there an accent where “Potter” sounds like more like “Putter” than it does here in the midwestern U.S.?




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.

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.