This gets extra tags — some kinda Meta for not using the standard joke set up in panel 1, and some kinda Geezer warning for those youngsters who don’t see something familiar behind “Killjoy was here”.
Maybe. My local newspaper (Chicago Tribune) has become an indistinct shadow of its former self, and the comics are shrunken and in black and white.
Despite the “(Not a CIDU)” category applied to this post as a whole, this item may take a bit of concentration and research before you can join in saying “Oh, I’ve got it completely decoded now!”.
There will be no arguing over whether this is truly a “meta” comic!
We think this is a rerun; but if so, then it falls into “an oldie but goodie”.
Here’s the funny-sad one promised in the category tags.
BTW, do they have a walkie-talkie set, or is that a quite old-school cell phone?
He meant to order an inflatable doll, but received an inflatable bed of nails.
P.S. A couple days later, this character and that prop re-appear; but decidedly not funny :-( .
BTW, Gocomics gives this feature filenames that look like loesp230927.jpg, clueing us that at some point they were considering it to be Life On Earth in Spanish. (The same artist does the Life on Earth comic.)
Here’s one kind of meta idea taken to a logical conclusion.
This one I wanted to make a daily standalone CIDU, but couldn’t really justify that.
OK, it’s a general picture of some sort of “bad boyfriend behavior”, but what exactly is he saying, to get rid of who or what? (Secondarily, since the absent partner here is a stand-in for the cartoonist, she might well be taking a share of blame for so often provoking exasperation.)
But then again, here they are together for some creative brainstorming!
Oh and BTW, for others who follow this strip, does this mean he is part of the spinoff “Side Gig” business that she and her pal from work are planning to quit their jobs to go launch? Or I guess he’s just being supportive about it…
Well we’re all familiar with that pun (sez Mitch), but not usually from this perspective, nor presented so starkly.
When I (zbicyclist) saw this on social media, I thought it was probably altered. I don’t think of Charles Schulz using a lot of groaner puns. But it’s legit: it appeared February 9, 1982, as I found out using the Peanuts search engine, https://peanuts-search.com/?q=bush%20pilot
How nice, when you can know just what’s coming, but the joke works fine anyhow!
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.
Comics I Don't Understand 