And that explains the smell of gas around here …
Chemgal sent this in, and classifies it as an Oy, but avers that she did LOL at it too.
And a final item from Andréa:
Whenever confronted with people who like to insist that JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner meant that he was calling himself a pastry, I like to think of alternate stories where a President needs to reinforce our commitment to Denmark.
Let’s mark this Lard’s as a CIDU-Oy, inasmuch as it does a rather nice word-play joke, but may take a couple beats to figure out.
Not a perfect portmanteau but it’ll do, and we get to treat the cat fans. For those not into cats, you may not be aware that a vernacular name for this sort of tricolor marking is “calico cat”.
And not-a-perfect exemplar of “pun”, but this is certainly word-play!
Moon hits a double today:
Here’s a funny pun from Boise Ed:
The dancer’s foot-across move in the last panel seems like just the right punctuation to signal a punch line, much like a rim shot. (Have there been tap-dancing stand-up-comedy acts?)
Picked this one up from Arnold Zwicky’s blog, where there is a full description and analysis.
And I just was watching Beanie Feldstein.
I did find out from a search* that there is a (supposedly) common idiom “money for old rope” meaning something like “easy money”. That doesn’t explain what it’s doing here, really.
Also, is the setting at Sartre’s more meaningful or decorative?
(*And that professional etymologists don’t much like the folk etymology about shipboard use of rope to caulk gaps in wood planks.)
(This one below not a CIDU; more of a LOL.)
When I was saving and then posting the Lard above, I thought the Sartre’s store was one of their fairly frequent locales; but I didn’t find one, on a quick backwards scroll thru the recent archive. Fine, so I treated it as unusual and made it part of this post’s title. And then a couple days later they give us this:
Luckily (I suppose) that we’ve been de-emphasizing “synchronicities”, or I would be slapping my forehead at not being able to re-find the one I saw in the last couple days with an apparently British guy approaching a band practice and asking “Mind if I sit in on your marmalade?”.
These are non-CIDUs or semi–CIDUs, where the joke or main point isn’t seriously in doubt, but some specifics of the writing or artwork seem somewhat off, or incomplete, or in need of explanation or correction. (Yet we don’t want to get into the territory of mockery or purely complaining.)
This first one is from Chak who calls it an Oops, and comments “The oopsies I’m thinking of are about well-drawn comics that slipped up”. In this Fastrack, the custom paperclip seems to change position without physical cause.:
Here was a Between Friends that seems to be illustrating a familiar saying with a situation that shows something different. In the picture, isn’t it more someone who has gone down and may not come back up?
We have been getting plenty of submissions or suggestions for The Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson, both classic and recent, some scanned from books and some copied off the 2019-established web site. Some suggestions were meant as classic solo-CIDU posts, but others might fit into one of these quasi-CIDU categories.
But there’s a big problem, that Larson has made a public point of his wish to not have his cartoons reprinted without permission and not under his control. There are people who doubt that this would have legal force if he tried to enforce it; but it doesn’t seem entirely right to defy the wishes of someone whose work we appreciate and want to enjoy.
So generally we have been responding to submissions and suggestions with a reminder of those constraints.
But thinking about Internet standards, short of copying and reposting something, and short also of the middle ground of embedding something by link, there is the fundamental WWW action of linking. That is well established as not infringing anything.
It’s also pretty inconvenient! Hard to have informed discussion threads when the item being commented on is not visible in the same window or tab! Still, it’s not beyond our abilities, CIDUers.
Sent in by Findus as an artwork/layout question rather than overall CIDU, this linked Far Side cartoon raises for them the question “what’s with the lovingly executed reflection in the mirror that is not a ‚mirror image‘? Is this intentional?”
And from Brian R we have this linked Far Side cartoon, which he suggested as a CIDU – but then understood fine the next day!
There actually is a certain amount of good sense to the now-classic bit about tech support asking “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?” as made famous by “The IT Crowd”. Now here in Lard’s World Peace Tips, it is cited in the wrong order. Is that the joke? Or was it accidental? Or intentional but supposed to be meaningful here, where the kite in the picture seems to be “off” since it is not flying, so is poised to be turned on, i.e., launched? My gosh that was long-winded!
Down the Garden Path Dept. Can you convince me this Loose Parts does not at all involve people getting squeaky voices from inhaling Helium?
I really like treating “erudite” as the name of a mineral. But don’t care for the supposed punch line here that was used to get that across and try to pun on the standard meaning.
A real groaner from XKCD, sent to us by Mark Jackson:
This Argyle Sweater from Andréa — but is it still sweater weather there?
Comics I Don't Understand 