CSotD: Friday Funnies – Hold The Politics

It’s getting really hard to avoid politics on Friday, and Rabbits Against Magic provides a demonstration.

I suppose there were people who listened to FDR’s Fireside Talks or Churchill’s encouragement during the Blitz and dismissed them as partisan politics, but not many.

Anyway, the “pollution” analogy holds for me. It’s everywhere.

 

Granted that Non Sequitur runs on the funny pages but is often political …

 

… and nobody is going to argue that Tom the Dancing Bug is not a political cartoon (read the rest here).

It still takes a lot of discipline to avoid noticing that what ought to be a universal response to a crisis has been turned to partisan squabbling.

 

Such that even a Bizarro that would have merited praise simply for the incredible draftsmanship of last Sunday’s offering is hard to separate from the politics of the moment.

I’m taking Piraro’s piece as a commentary on social media without reference to specific politics, and I think I’m right, but it’s hard to separate those two topics from each other, particularly when rude, confrontational, boorish behavior is embedded in our political system.

No names, please.

 

Anyway, Macanudo also comments on social media here, and made me laff with no reference to politics.

It can be done.

Macanudo often makes me laff, and Liniers — Who is from Argentina (scroll down) — brings to the strip an international touch that reminds me of going up to Montreal for Juste Pour Rire, where you’d have all these American and Canadian acts in the theaters doing intellectual, observational standup bits, while out in the street there would be buskers and mimes from around the world riding around on unicycles and hitting each other with exploding slapsticks as if we were back in the 18th century.

 

The interesting crossover being that Liniers has been mellowed in a brew of AngloAmerican pop culture since he was a little boy, so that he produces a blend of international childlike silliness with Western references.

Plus an earworm that may follow you around for awhile, twice as annoying because you’ll be swapping out the real lyrics for something completely foolish.

But not political.

 

I don’t know if this Zits is political or not.

It wasn’t at first, though it invited an argument. The reason you (might) have a landline in the home is because there are times when you don’t care who you reach.

“Turn on the Crockpot” is dependent on someone being near the Crockpot, regardless of who it is, as is “Has the driveway been shoveled?”

Then again, that makes more sense in a family of five or six than a family of three.

Particularly in a family of three in which one member is always home, for reasons that wander dangerously close to being political.

This woman is apparently a cook and laundress for two guys who are each old enough to have jobs and drivers’ licenses and yet it is not set in the 1950s.

 

Nor is Luann, where the current arc is about the mother wanting to get a job simply helping out in the quasi-nightclub they own, and, today, she notes that her role in the family so far has been to infantilize the other members.

If it were just those two strips, I’d be inclined to shrug it off, and I’d be disinclined to get into it since it’s neither valid nor cool to trash a strip simply for not being on my wavelength.

But this is endemic.

There was a time — not making this up — in which a professor could say “philosophy won’t teach you how to change the diapers, but it will give you something to think about while you change the diapers,” and his female students would not only concur but would quote him approvingly.

That time ended, somewhat abruptly, a half century ago.

A lot of comic strips, however, seem to be caught in a time warp in which newspapers are still delivered by little boys on bicycles and guys don’t know how to cook and, yes, women stay home vacuuming all day.

Even Dagwood switched from a streetcar to a car pool for commuting while Blondie went into the catering business.

Not every strip can be as hep as Blondie.

 

Though speaking of things from half a century ago, Prickly City, which is normally political in tone, took a break last Sunday to salute a pair of incompatible holidays.

I did get a giggle out of the concept, but then slid into one of my favorite rants which is that, if you don’t like licorice, why not leave it alone for those of us who do?

Back in The Good Old Days, one of the goals in buying candy before a movie was picking something that wouldn’t be gone before the coming attractions were over.

Hershey bars taste great but are useless in that setting. You wanted Jujubes, a Sugar Daddy, Turkish Taffy or Bit O’ Honey, or, yes, licorice.

There was a kind of licorice that was shaped like a candy bar and, when you were outside, you could bite off a chaw and then spit brown juice just like it was tabacky.

In the theater, it would last through much of the movie, though not as long as Good ‘n Plentys, which made you work your way through a hard candy shell before you got to the chewy licorice center.

Well, they fixed that. Things that used to yank out your fillings now melt in your mouth and they’ve eliminated challenging flavors.

Get off my lawn. And pick up your damn candy wrappers.

 

Contemporary, topical, non-political

Alex zeroes in on the moment and there are any number of reasons I loved today’s strip, besides the fact that everyone truly is curating their backgrounds.

Note that Penny is more like Janis Day or Tank McNamara’s tennis pro girlfriend in that she can be dubious of his actions without being a nag and she’s clearly his intellectual equal. And moderately hot, comme il faut.

If you find someone like that, here’s some serious, non-political advice:

Don’t screw it up.