Well we’re all familiar with that pun (sez Mitch), but not usually from this perspective, nor presented so starkly.
When I (zbicyclist) saw this on social media, I thought it was probably altered. I don’t think of Charles Schulz using a lot of groaner puns. But it’s legit: it appeared February 9, 1982, as I found out using the Peanuts search engine, https://peanuts-search.com/?q=bush%20pilot
How nice, when you can know just what’s coming, but the joke works fine anyhow!
Sometimes the intent and joke are clear, but you have the feeling there is a tiny bit of disappointment over a detail that is wrong, or at any rate could be improved.
Don’t you want the first panel to say “take requests” instead of “play requests”?
All right, a good point to be making. But it takes too much work to confirm that the two structureless and unparseable series of terms differ only in the first position, where one has senior and the other junior. Why can’t the series be more varied? Say, throw in a deputy or associate or adjunct. Go ask the second second assistant director (actual title on some film crews).
This Wrong Hands doesn’t quite work for me (==mitch). But maybe that’s because I don’t have the same vowel in fraud and frog. Is it better for someone who does?
My complaint here is trivial but it doesn’t stop bothering me, and distracting from the joke. The Joker is ALWAYS wild. Many times he is not included in the game, sure, but that doesn’t make him non-wild.
I wanted to pair this with a Bizarro I saw making almost the same joke, and with almost the same problem. It had both a Joker and a 2, and seemed to again attribute the part-time wildness to the Joker; when there was the opportunity to instead use our knowledge that “Deuces wild” is one of those dealer’s-choice options that would serve to make the 2 sometimes wild and sometimes not! The trouble is, that Bizarro was the June 2023 page on an official Bizarro hanging calendar on my wall, hence not so easily downloadable.
Well y’know what? That’s not an insuperable problem …
And, seeing it again, I should retract the claim that this one gets it wrong too. Here the Joker sometimes doesn’t feel like being wild, but is condemned to wildness always; and he is envious of the therapist deuce, for whom wildness is a sometime thing.
Just BTW, does “aggro” in casual speech these days mean aggressive or aggravating?
Dýou think this is well-positioned to become even more popular than the one about the land of the blind?
A fine line between pun and equivocation.
In the GoComics comments, Teresa Burritt (creator of Frog Applause) revealed that this was a CIDU for her! (Several commenters answered to provide the Stephen King reference.)
Thanks to jjmcgaffey for suggesting Rae the Doe, and
for calling this “a kerning pun!” to assist anyone who may find it puzzling.
And an OY-semi-CIDU from Maggiethecartoonist:
This song is in that peculiar category of musical quasi-familiarity, where I became acquainted with a piece from its use in advertising, or as a television theme song, that I probably never would have run into otherwise. “New Soul” by Yael Naim. “You’ve Got Time” by Regina Spektor.“One Week” by The Barenaked Ladies (this one I might have found otherwise). “Flower Duet from Lakmé” by Léo Delibes (this one I surely would have run into sooner or later, but did encounter first in the British Airways ads). Most of those I put in a playlist at some point or even bought further work from the same artist ; but “Mister Roboto” always remained for me just “that song from one of those car commercials” until last week, when this cartoon appeared and I wanted to verify the idea suggested by the pun. (BTW, the car brand turns out to have been VW, and the sketch uses comic actor Tony Hale.)
If you’re thinking “Didn’t we just see this same joke?” you may be remembering this Life On Earth we posted recently. (Hey, that was in Sunday Funnies – LOLs, May 7th, 2023 . How come the Farcus today goes in the OYs?)
Found on Facebook without good information. We’ve tagged for “Frank Svoboda” based on the (c) line; but searching that name finds someone who was a collector / dealer / agent but doesn’t say he was also a creator, and those roles could fit with copyright holder. So maybe the writing on the side of the bar is the signature? It seems to say “Phranque” and while there is a band with that name I didn’t find any cartoonists or illustrators. And maybe that brings us back around to Frank S, who could have liked stylizing his first name.
A suggestion from Maggiethecartoonist:
Discussion among Maggie and the editors suggested that there are several informations perhaps not immediately known to all readers, which are useful to unpacking the multiple jokes/OYs here. So something of a semi-CIDU.
No, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Zippy.
To cite the Classic CIDU Question, what’s the joke?
One might think that Wayno’s blog would help, but his comments on this one were mostly about how he rearranged the panel version for the strip version.