Your editors are greeting today’s holiday with some favorite comics, some Christmassy, some not. Enjoy!
Here’s one for the great CIDU cat-admiration tradition!
Seems like the reindeer might take a lichen to an in-flight snack, also.
It’s Halloween! It’s one of the set of similar days with very different tones: There’s the Day of the Dead, with reverence for the departed. There’s Halloween, where in theory the evil spirits have power, but has evolved into a chance to meet the neighbor kids, if only briefly. There’s All Saints Day on November 1, a day of celebration. Following that, on November 2, is All Souls Day, which I remember in particular for that scary sequence in the old Latin liturgy:
O wrath, O day of mourning,
O hear the fateful prophet’s warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning. …
When the Judge his seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth,
Nothing unavenged remaineth.
What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Who for me be interceding,
When the just are mercy needing? …
The general tone is aptly captured in Verdi’s or Mozart’s Dies Irae, from their Requiem Masses.
Of course, you might also mistranslate “Dies Irae” as “Day of the Iras”, and listen to Ira Glass’s This American Life, or some of those great songs from George and Ira Gershwin. Or not.
A sad-LOL.
This might be a Semi-CIDU, as there is the question of whether this is how the cowboy bathes (and gets the horse to manage the timing and coins), or it’s at the horse’s volition as it wants its gear and rider to be clean.
The “when I look” and “someone will sneak” look like ordinary indicatives, with something like habitual aspect. But surely this doesn’t happen a lot! If we take into account the strip title, that makes this binocular-knocking one of those fears — we just have to understand a “One of my fears is that when ..” at the start and it all comes together.
And here’s our Macabre-LOL for the week:
Background: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-question-mark-galaxy-photo
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Teamwork makes the team work.
Hurt people hurt people.
/
Exercise in indexicality.
Quite an interesting question!
Brilliant!
The lion is the king of beasts, And husband of the lioness. Gazelles and things on which he feasts Address him as your highoness.
–Ogden Nash Poems to Carnival of the Animals
Y’know how sometimes when Cornered has a Sunday duplex strip (or higher multiple!), and just one of them hits the funny bone just right? And then CIDU is stuck trying to clip or trim to get that one panel? But this time it’s a case of “Why not both?” Two LOLs for the price of one!
And if we’re still in the Weekend of Remembering nineties/oughties Songs, here is one suggested by that comic:
Saturday Morning OYs – April 1st, 2023
By placing this here, do I have imposter (long o) syndrome?
Thanks to Dale Eltoft for sending in the second Diamond Lil in the pair below. “This follows from the day before but I don’t know if that’s a necessary setup.” On that recommendation we’re also including the set-up one first, though it isn’t in itself an OY.
(In a followup, they make it clear that you better say it in the pun way or there is no joke left!)
Oy! this is so labored of a pun — but sometimes you just have to honor that labor! (Also interesting how there had to be a switch of syntactic role of me in the last panel.)
Added Thursday – This cartoon was the main topic of an Arnold Zwicky post on his blog, which says a lot more than my remark above on the parsing of the punned title in the last panel; and also brings up Stephan Pastis as a mainstay of this genre.
A multi-OY from Cat and Girl, with e3xtras from meme-land.
Good job holding off the reveal!
OK, pay attention because there might be a quiz on this!
First off, Phil Smith III sent in this Brewster Rockit as a CIDU. “I was OK until the last panel,” he writes, “and have NO idea what it’s supposed to mean?!”
And I couldn’t make sense of the last panel as a punch line, either.
Meanwhile, DanV sent in both the above Brewster Rockit and the Betty below as a synchronicity pair.
“Two different ways of experiencing the same situation,” writes DanV, “I confess I’ve had both of these things happen to me. :) Not a laugh out loud, more of a rueful chuckle.”
What could he mean, I wondered; how are these the same joke? Oh wait, aha! The Brewster joke is not in the final panel, but the penultimate. Oldbot and, uh, Bub have done the parallel sort of oblivious overlooking.
That leaves the final panel of Brewster unexplained. Well, which Monday does he mean? Is he making it sooner or later? I don’t know, and I’m even more tired of writing this than you are of reading it…
Comics I Don't Understand 