Danny Boy – London Derriere sends this hair-raising one in. Might be a bit of a CIDU, or maybe a Geezer Alert, although Nair is still a brand.
“This one is probably flawed by the last panel, where it seems the cartoonist gave in to the feeling that readers would need help with the senses of pivot word “down”.”
Mitch4 sends in this recently rerun Tiger strip: “The pun turns on a structural ambiguity. “That’s what they call a punching bag” and “Good name for it” (because it has ‘punched’ back at the kid who was using it) . The gerund “punching” takes on two different roles. Similar to (tho not identical to) the classic “Visiting relatives can be tedious”.”
When this first scrolled up for me, I had just glanced at it when I was called away to do something else, and my inner ear was repeating the final panel but misremembered with the terms reversed. I thought it was making an excellent if subtle point. Can a dog do a trick without *knowing* it? (Can a human?) Does a dog really know anything, or is that just what we say as a courtesy, while meaning the dog has a habit or pattern? But then, how does lack of knowledge not prevent successful performance? We say a person knows how to ride a bicycle when we see they are able to, but chances are they could not articulate what to do — so is it the same courtesy designation?
And I think we could raise some of the same questions from the way the comic actually presents the line!
Love that Monty Crisco! (But I don’t know what typo on Nesselrode Pie would be likely, or funny.)
Always go for consistency!
And a P.S. from B.C.
He tries just about every day, so why not give in and post one now and then.
Growing up, I knew only two pasta shapes: spaghetti, for spaghetti and meatballs, and macaroni, for macaroni and cheese. Imagine my surprise to find such an endless variety of shapes coming out of the extruder. And tortellini! And soba! And rice noodles! Now there’s chickpea pasta, etc. It’s a wide, wild world out there.
Just pasta these comics is a place to comment on your own favorite shape/type.
A synchronicity here, with two Dante-themed comics on the same day. What a Paradiso!
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.
Well, there’s a good OY on the left, and a good LOL on the right, and I’m feeling too lazy to get out the cropper, so let’s print it twice, once today, and once yesterday or tomorrow.
Not a huge LOL, but Tiger and Punkinhead here are reproducing a classic problem in the literature of logical representation, going back to Bertrand Russell.
An Arlo-LOL from Divad who says “I’ve got a pretty good guess what was on Arlo’s mind (in general), but I’m trying to not picture what he’s specifically thinking.”
Republishing this post, so that the site front page will have some comics, instead of the discussions of the domain name difficulties. But an update on those has been posted to
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.
Comics I Don't Understand 