CSotD: Humor, intelligent and otherwise
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You’re showing your age, Barry Blitt. I, too, remember the horror we felt learning that the French considered Jerry Lewis a comic genius.
It was back in the days of Richard Pryor and Firesign Theater, slightly after Shelly Berman and Lenny Bruce, back when Monty Python made skits spoofing DH Lawrence and having communist theorists answer questions about sports and pop music.
The French were simply ahead of the curve. We’ve since embraced Austin Powers and Ace Ventura and have you watched SNL since the original cast departed?
Not to mention the Great Cornholio, which brings us to this:
Even a clever pun like this one in Brevity (AMS) is based on a game whose name made my jaw drop. I’m relatively certain my mother has no idea where the term originated, but it was still a shock to hear her say it.
Nor is this whitewashing attempt terribly convincing. However, in my tireless quest for truth, I searched newspapers.com for references to the game between 1700 and 1980 and found, instead, this 1866 article from the Ipswich Journal in England:
And this 1876 article about hot springs from the Wilmington Journal (North Carolina):
There were also a couple of articles from the 1960s indicating that use of springs for relief of corns and bunions continued into the 20th Century. But nothing about a game or, to be fair, about alternatives to toilet paper.
I’m not against jokes about biological functions, by the way, and I’m certainly not against jokes about dogs. And dogs are certainly keyed into biological functions, as seen in this They Can Talk.
I don’t understand people who expect their dog to maintain a solid, four-mile-an-hour walking pace and jerk at their leash if when it stops to check out a particularly interesting canine posting. You may not be able to appreciate what your dog is experiencing, but you should have enough empathy to get pleasure from the dog’s pleasure.
After all, the dog doesn’t understand everything you do, either, but it obviously enjoys your company enough to not care. Return the favor.
The dog deserves your respect anyway, because it’s way above you in some ways. If I could have my dog’s nose for 24 hours, I don’t know what I’d smell first.
I think it probably wouldn’t be pee, but, then again, I don’t know what information she’s processing. Dogs can smell if someone has cancer or if a diabetic is having a low-blood-sugar crisis, so who knows what else they get from those kabillion scent receptors?
I think being a dog must be like being on a 24/7 acid trip. I doubt very much that I could handle being a dog.
Adrian Raeside at The Other Coast (Creators) is way tuned into dogs, though I think he’s joking about the taste of dead rabbit, since it’s probably fantastic, though I’d like to think the taste of Dad would be the bestest taste in the whole world to my dog.
She not only eats dead things but is enthusiastic about kibble every morning. I figure my flavor falls somewhere between the two on the scale, but I have no idea where and maybe I don’t want to know.
This past Sunday, The Other Coast also picked up on the growing number of bear sightings. I grew up in bear country, but most of the people who saw them did so on purpose, going up to the dump on summer evenings with bags of marshmallows to feed them.
The redeeming element of this was that it only taught bears to hang out at the dump, which wasn’t ideal but was better than having them wandering into town.
The dumps are all closed and contained these days, and bears do come down to raid garbage cans and bird feeders, but they’re mostly considered nuisances, not threats.
A young bear has been approaching hikers in New Hampshire recently, but authorities plan to start some negative reinforcement to see if they can disabuse him of the idea that people are a food source, and meanwhile are asking visitors to stop giving him that impression in the first place.
Blackies aren’t particularly dangerous and tend to come out on the short end of these encounters, since the law does not permit euthanizing the knotheads who feed them.
Meanwhile, one of my dog’s kennelmates treed a black bear in her yard the other day, despite the 20-pound/200-pound differential.
Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint) skewers the current mood of despair with this sarcastic tribute to the triumph of greed over decency. It’s a throwback to those ancient days of intelligent humor, and you have to either have read some history or be older than me or Barry Blitt to remember when people like Upton Sinclair and Ida B. Wells sounded the alarm and politicians like Theodore Roosevelt rose to the occasion.
Ida B. Wells, incidentally, had four children. No word on how she felt about cats.
Speaking of pharmaceutical companies, Rhymes With Orange (KFS) gets a laff for this.
It reminded me of eight years ago, after my bout with cancer, when I was recruited for a study to see if radiation treatments would prevent recurrence. Some of us would get periodic radiation treatments, others would be in the placebo group.
I asked the researcher how the placebo group would work: Would they just stand behind my chair and make buzzing noises? But she said, no, the placebo group just wouldn’t get any treatment.
However, the funding for the study fell through so we were all in the placebo group.
So far, so good.
Juxtaposition of the Day
In the Bleachers — AMS — July 25
More aperture references, and, while I’m used to coincidences in cartooning, I can’t help but think that, if we got hold of the schedule for Seinfeld reruns, we could figure out the lead time for both artists.
Update: Liniers approvingly points out that his version features a heart and initials LD (Larry David) and JS (Jerry Seinfeld) in the corner.
Arlo & Janis (AMS) continue to plan their move in what is less a “story arc” and more a long-term plotline. It’s quite a while since I’ve moved, but I can sure relate to this one.
To end with some intelligent ’60s humor, here’s a short that played in theaters without alerting audiences that it was a Bergman spoof. It features Madeline Kahn in her first film role.
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