Ah, the eternal question: to explain or not to explain?
From Andréa, who calls it “An OY that may, or may not, have been intended”:
And it misses a third reading, an imperative exclamation equivalent to “Shoo!”.
Sender Dana K and I were in minor disagreement over whether the word-play element here is pun-like enough to count as an OY. “Neg/Q Scope Ambiguity” is certainly there potentially in the 3rd panel; but it’s not clearly intentional, and even less the point of the gag.
This Moderately Confused sent in by Rob is in what we might dub the “foibles funnies” genre:
Two funny bits that seem like they might belong more to winter publication. The Kliban of course is a reprint from ages ago, so that makes sense. And the Liz Climo is funny any time. Also noticed by Andréa and used in a comment!
This took me a minute, as I don’t often use “home” for a physical house, the building.
For anyone not familiar with the comic, the character on the right, Lyndon, is a psychiatrist or therapist. So Freudian slips are like his stock in trade. But there is something funny in how this patient or client responds to the “Say again?” with an almost-repetition and not acknowledging he has made a correction.
An excellent OY that also had me at least chuckling out loud.
(But I have to confess I don’t know who the guy on the right is. I hope his identity wasn’t another part of the joke.)
Thanks to Rob for these next two OYs (and some hard-to-classify strips coming up elsewhere on the site):
I guess I’m wrong here — I would have said this doesn’t work unless he actually says “Heckuva” (variation possible for the c and/or k, but the v obligatory). But the crowd at GoComics seemed to take it in stride.
And a Sandal Synchronicity:
I only recently started sometimes reading One Big Happy, and evidently don’t yet have a good handle on the age and attitude of the intended audience. But these are all clear OYs on familiar sayings.
Is this Horace himself, doing some kind of costumed performance? Or an ancestor or other predecessor, who looked like that in his heyday?
And a definite meta-OY:
Comics I Don't Understand 