CSotD: Dumb Jokes (Mostly the good kind!)

“Have you seen them?”

I have an appetite for dumb jokes and Matt Percival offers an excellent example, because people losing their glasses on their foreheads is a very old gag with little potential, while dogs digging up the yard searching for buried bones is ditto, but when you put them together … well, it’s not brilliant but to be so silly is quite daring.

And, foolish as the gag may be, it takes imagination to come up with the combination.

But hang on …

Asher Perlman takes silly in a different direction, because this is silly without being funny but I laughed anyway: That’s how silly it is.

Desert island cartoons are such an ancient cliche that just seeing bearded men on tiny sand piles with a single palm tree is almost automatically a message that nothing good is about to happen. But Perlman says, “So?”

In defense of the gag, we’ve all had the experience of thinking we were lost and suddenly finding ourselves some place ridiculously familiar. I was once resigned to spending the night in the woods only to round a hill and realize I was less than a mile from home.

But the gag needs no defense. It’s just silly. It’s defense is that silly is okay if you do it right.

Juxtaposition of the Forgotten Holiday

Day By Dave — AMS

Brewster Rockit, Space Guy — Tribune

“Talk Like a Pirate Day” used to be a much bigger deal. On September 19, there would be a flood of comics with people talking like pirates and people would bring the event into their offices and annoy everyone there.

Sigh. It’s come to this: Dave Whamond digs it up as yet another obscure holiday to bring to public attention, while Brewster Rockit, the silliest man in space, gets it wrong. Note that Pam simply corrects him; she isn’t playing along.

Not only that, but the banks will be open today and the mail will be delivered. What is this world coming to?

I don’t quite know what to make of this Buckets (AMS), because it sounds to me like the kind of conversation I used to hear at Camp Lord O’ The Flies, where comic books were one of our only outside distractions and we swapped them back and forth between cabins.

And we’d engage in these conversations about them, mostly speculating with the uninformed but intelligent logic of adolescence, which Greg Cravens captures wonderfully up until the final panel when Toby’s pal says something that actually makes a great deal of sense.

It’s not his remark is funny, but the insight provides a jolt, which is just as good.

Maybe the reason I liked it is that most comic strips portray youngsters as morons and this is a lot more realistic than usual.

Speaking of which:

Paul Gilligan, known around here as the creator of Pooch Cafe (AMS), has a book, Boy vs. Shark, coming out next month but available for pre-sale at Amazon and I’ll bet your local bookstore would be happy to put in an order for you as well.

I had a chance to read an advance copy and I expected some fun and hijinx, since Pooch Cafe is full of both, but it turns out to be a very simple, often funny but overall thoughtful memoir of being a kid back when the movie version of Jaws came out and was pretty scary, though a 10-year-old boy would be highly reluctant to admit that.

A lot of cartoonists are turning to YA graphic novels and several have had marked success in the field. I think young readers will really enjoy this one, both those still of an age to identify with young Paul and those who have passed through that age level but still remember it.

But you don’t have to have a kid to read this one. Just a decent memory. It’s got a nice, light touch throughout, but the nostalgia is real and I found myself drawn back to that age.

Good stuff.

Speaking of memories, Big Nate (AMS) took me back to English class and lame writing prompts.

In eighth grade, our English teacher had pictures on the wall and would tell us to pick one and write about it. My friend Chris and I would try to outdo each other in coming up with outrageous interpretations of these wholesome calendar shots, and he won when he selected a picture of a puppy peeking out of a gift box under a Christmas tree and wrote an essay in which the poor thing suffocated before the box could be opened.

But I did one better a few years later, when our choice of prompts included “Describe a 4-H activity” and I wrote a process essay on how to muck out a horse stall. The class roared with laughter as I read it aloud, but, unbeknownst to me, in the previous class, my friend Terry had delivered an oral report on Catcher in the Rye in which he used a street term in describing Holden’s encounter with a working girl.

We both ended up permanently expelled from the teacher’s classes, but, despite our lack of further instruction in English, I became a professional writer and Terry opened a bookstore.

Alex tosses cold water on anybody who thinks an AI application will turn them into a stock market tyro. It’s the same question about books revealing no-fail gambling strategies: Why would anyone publicize a system if they could wipe out casinos themselves?

Same answer: Other suckers are needed to furnish the funds you hope to snatch.

Meanwhile, the First Family of Grifters is opening up a cryptocoin trading company, which the Donald is putting in the hands of his sons. Perhaps he wants to watch from a safe distance as Samuel Bankman-Fried appeals his conviction on the grounds that the judge was prejudiced.

Same judge who found against Trump in the E. Jean Shepard defamation case. Small world, isn’t it?

We won’t have What’s-His-Name to kick around anymore, according to an announcement by distributor Daryll Cagle. The retirement is blamed on humorless liberals, but several political cartoonists with the cojones to stand behind their opinions objected to Cagle allowing “Rivers” to operate anonymously.

So his sense of persecution is justified, though others do reveal their names.