CSotD: Catching Up With the Comedy
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Baby Blues (AMS) offers a last New Year’s gag as we start to settle into 2025, and once more raises the question I’ve asked before: Do people still get bonuses? I know they do in stock trading circles, so maybe that’s what Daryll does, though he’s sure around the house more than most go-getters, and if a broker isn’t a go-getter, that bonus won’t be anything to crow over.
If you worked for a newspaper in the past two decades, your yearly bonus was that you still had a job. We used to get a turkey or ham at Thanksgiving and another at Christmas at one paper, but that stopped after Lee Enterprises acquired us.
The deal was that we’d give a local grocery store a full page color ad in exchange for the turkeys and hams, so the cost to the paper was minimal, but, hey, we can’t be giving out free space in the paper just to make the staff think they matter, so Corporate put the kibosh on it.
Undermining morale seems in theory like good management strategy.
Part of the “return to office” movement requiring people to stop working from home is based on the hope that people will quit instead and make layoffs unnecessary, but, while a number of people do resign over it, it’s rarely enough to meet Corporate’s head-chopping quotas.
Speaking of corporate go-getters, Alex cracked me up with this dismal reflection on our fading culture, because the alternative to laughing is going into a depression and wotthehell, there’s a dance in this old boy yet.
I hear that people don’t read, though I know a lot of people who do, but the notion of having ChatGPT read the book for you is funny because a lot of what’s on the best-seller lists might just as well have been written by ChatGPT.
No surprise: Sturgeon’s Law applies, 90% of everything is crap, and too many formulaic favorites seem to have been extruded from MFA programs and writer’s workshops for praise in book clubs.
Thus was it ever. I’m currently reading “Tale of Two Cities” and while I really liked “Great Expectations,” I’m finding this a slog. You can tell it was written for serialization in magazines because all the chapters are the same length and some of them could have been paragraphs but were stretched to fit.
Another clue is that characters who have no business being present suddenly appear when a new chapter requires them, which is what happens when you write and publish a chapter at a time instead of laying the whole thing out first.
I’m nearly through, but I feel like the little boy who said of a miserable Sunday school picnic “I’m so glad I’m home, I’m glad I went.”
However, there is hope on the library shelf: If you want to understand Donald Trump and have several hearty laughs as well, read The Way We Live Now, which Anthony Trollope wrote in 1875 but which might just as well have been written today. It’s quite lengthy, but it won’t take as long to read as it will take to watch it play out over the next four years, and, like Catch-22, it’s a whole lot funnier when it’s just fiction.
Crabgrass (AMS) has wrapped up its Christmas story arc and is, for the moment, just doing gags. Today’s cracked me up because much as parents and teachers and experts try to find ways to take the nastiness out of kids’ games, they surely fail.
There was no “Punch Bug” when I was a kid, possibly because there weren’t any Volkswagens here, but we had plenty of games that involved inflicting pain on each other. There were bullies who played too hard, but most of us were friends and while our mothers gasped over the bruises on our upper arms, we accepted it as the price for not having said “units” or “safety” when we ought to have.
We also played “stretch” as our fathers had played mumbly-peg, which didn’t hurt anyone but makes me wonder at the fact that eight-year-old boys were allowed to carry jack knives. Except for Keith, but Keith’s mom would have kept him in bubble-wrap if they’d had it back then.
Zachary Kanin draws a scene of overwhelming self-awareness. I don’t suppose anybody sets out with such realistic expectations, and I also don’t suppose the kids involved even remember the promises made.
I do remember that walking the dog was one job and feeding the dog was another, but I don’t remember if they were assigned in advance or if we just did them as needed. I took Buttons for her last walk every night, as soon as I was old enough, which is how I learned the constellations.
Buttons was a sweet girl and I loved her, but this Speed Bump (Creators) made me laugh, because, yes, it would have been easier to train the squirrel. The only trick command she knew was “speak,” and why anyone would train a dog to do that is beyond me.
My current dog doesn’t know any tricks except ones she taught herself. I housebroke her and after that just counted on her to pick up on what I wanted, which has worked out. She’s awfully bright.
In fact, here’s what her breed is capable of, but I don’t speak Swedish, so we’re out of luck.
Unlike this antelope in Andertoons, I never got much career guidance. The prevailing attitude was that, since I was a good writer, I should write novels, and that mediocre writers worked for newspapers. Yeah, hacks like Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Mark Twain …
“Hack” comes from hackney, a hired conveyance, and in this country is an insult but I gather in Britain is simply a term for a reporter. Samuel Johnson said “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” which reminds me of a Pulitzer winner who, speaking of those who write for the joy of being published, snarled “When I want to see my name in print, I look in the phone book.”
Back when such things existed, obviously. Still, better to be hired like a hackney than allow yourself to be ridden for free.
And it’s a small leap from a hackney to a Cab:
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