JMcAndrew sends in these two, with an old man theme: “Trying to figure this one out. I’ve seen the movie “Grumpy Old Men” and don’t think that Walter Matthau looks anything like Saddam Hussein.”
JMcAndrew: I get the joke and I have seen “Blow Out” which is actually an excellent film. Submitted as an obvious eww but also considered that Travolta is now over 70 it wouldn’t be that surprising to find out he does have need for incontinence products.
Now *that* was a surprise!
How many of us have a pile of unread books? How long as the oldest unread one been in that pile? When was the last time you thinned out the pile, by saying “Nah, not going to ever read that?” Did you regift the book, and later found it sitting in THEIR unread books pile?
How to you label it? “Books I’ll read when I retire”? or “Books to read when I can’t sleep”?
Geezer alert?
Or that scene has been replayed / imitated / parodied so much that it could be well known even among those who have never seen any more of the movie it comes from.
Thanks to Usual John, for suggesting this one, and also for alerting us that D.D. Degg’s column at The Daily Cartoonist had a look at this strip , and very courteously linked to us when he applied the phrase “Comic I Don’t Understand” to this ThatABaby.
All right — Why Dagwood? Do you think he is known for Frisbee mishaps?
Not truly a pun, but still word-centered humor.
Somehow I passed by this panel several times before understanding the simple parallelism of the two signs.
As always — but it needs saying explicitly again now and then — we like to think of this as a reader-participation site, and not just for your invaluable (or anyhow amusing) comments, but for suggestions of comics to run and discuss.
Please share your specific suggestions of panels or strips, in CIDU, LOL, and OY categories, either by direct email to
(that’s “CIDU dot Submissions” at gmail dot com) or by using the handy-dandy Suggest A CIDU form page!
This “Barney & Clyde” strip was submitted by Usual John:
I think the gag is that the strip itself does not have (and does not need) a gag, but I’m sure there are other possible explanations.
I went hunting to see if there were any other worthwhile April Fools’ strips, but was sorely disappointed. Almost all of the “standard” setups simply showed one character playing a typically lame practical joke on someone else. The best strips were those few that elevated the humor with some sort of “meta” component. Here are a few examples:
(I especially liked this “Thatababy” strip because this year, my daughter decided to rearrange the silverware drawer as an April Fools’ joke. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, because we all just assumed that she had forgotten the usual arrangement.)
The last two examples are from the great Comic Strip Switcheroo (1-Apr-1997):
P.S. Feel free to embed your own favorite April Fools’ comics in the comments!
Have you heard about the notorious guy who had secret families in multiple places on his travel schedule? By the time he was found out, he had fathered enough kids to be called in the tabloids The 21-Son Galoot.
And from that same Wayno plus his senior partner, Dan Piraro in Bizarro:
This sub-feature of the SFPC repertoire rarely does much for me. But this instance worked well — maybe because it isn’t really “for the epically/brutally challenged” as much as “for the nightly news evaluation challenged”.
This was a momentary CIDU — I was puzzling out which side of the deal was losing, and why — until the GoComics comments cleared it all up. If you still need a clue, look at those pages in his right hand.
Yes, we don’t publish synchronicities any more. But two comics on the obscure theme of squirrel pushing showing up not just on the same day, but right next to each other in my GoComics feed, was too much to resist.
… for ratio of painstaking art work over contribution to resulting joke value?
Comics I Don't Understand 