CSotD: So Funny I Forgot to Laugh
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Our theme starts with today’s Baby Blues (AMS). My first impression was that it was another “overscheduled kids” gag, which is an okay issue in general but has been done and overdone and doesn’t make me laugh anymore.
So I flipped past, but then “Wait till your dad gets home” pinged my brain and I went back. Of course, I’m familiar with the phrase, which was even an animated sitcom in 1972-74, based, as Wikipedia reports, on “All In The Family,” and, no, I don’t know why both examples spell it with two L’s.
What I do know is that it didn’t mean “And then you’re gonna get such a scolding!” Mothers can scold and always have. It means “You’re going to get a beating,” and who does that anymore?
I know it still happens, but it reminds me of a puppy from one of our litters which went to a guy who wanted it but who was married to a woman who didn’t.
She wouldn’t help housebreak the dog, so they played the “Wait ’til your father gets home” game, and the dog got spanked hours after it pooped on the floor.
Of course the poor thing had no idea why a big scary man was yelling and hitting it. So it quit eating and it bit their kid and we took it back. The puppy had run a burglar out of their house at 12 weeks of age, but now it was a neurotic fear-biter. We ended up keeping him because nobody else could handle him.
I also grew up with a friend or two who, around 8th or 9th grade, confessed, “I beat up the old man last night.” Changing the game after a lifetime of whippings was a rite of passage, and I wish it meant they’d be more gentle with their own kids, but I doubt it worked that way.
So, yeah: That was so funny I forgot to laugh.
Another innocent gag that set me off in a different direction. And genuinely innocent, because, in Madam & Eve, Thandi’s grandmother didn’t necessarily take her to see that R-rated movie. Thandi is just reflecting on Marvel superhero movies in general.
It would indeed be good to have a percentage of the gross of Deadpool & Wolverine, which is shattering box office records and totally resuscitating Marvel action flicks, but excuse me if I seriously doubt that its huge audiences are entirely over 17.
So in this case, I got to chuckle over Thandi’s greed — as the cartoonists intended — and to laugh aloud yet once more over this Committed from 1999:
This Tommy Siegel piece rang a bell, but the bell it rang was a very different coffeemaker gag by Joe Dator:
The two things they have in common is that (1) boy-howdy, there sure are a lot of ways to make coffee and (2) New Yorker cartoonists focus on that sort of thing. They both cracked me up, which is probably why I remembered Dator’s from four years ago.
The “So funny I forgot to laugh” part isn’t their fault. It just so happens that any gag about how to make hot beverages is going to strike me wrong this morning, because yesterday I came across this truly, depressing example of Selling Out:
I can laugh at Seigel’s analysis of what sort of person uses what sort of coffeemaker, but I can’t figure out for the life of me what kind of nitwit wants to make herbal tea in a Keurig. Well, other than the kind of nitwit who, as the old phrase goes, doesn’t know how to boil water.
Yeah, yeah: “We only have the Keurig at the office.” Here: For less than ten bucks you can stop filling the Earth with little plastic cups and go back to paying $3.59 for 20 tagless, compostible teabags instead of $19.49 for 24 servings.
The real pain here is that I was living in Boulder when Mo was tramping around in the mountains picking herbs and putting them in little handmade cloth sacks that we bought in head shops and health food stores.
And speaking of heart-breaking sell-outs, do you remember this guy?
That’s how Keith Knight saluted Colin Kaepernick, back when Kap took a knee for justice and found himself kicked out of the NFL by rightwing team owners and the doofus in the White House.
Kaepernick got a whole lot of cred for his brave, principled stand. What a hero! What an inspiration!
What a sell-out!
Keef’s latest cartoon about the guy tells it all, though Knight adds this commentary at his Patreon site:
Here I was all jealous that I missed getting a chance to meet Colin Kaepernick at Comic-Con. But then I find out he was raising a sh**load of money to put folks like me outta business!! It’s especially hard to take when he knows what it’s like when you’re not allowed to do that thing you are really great at. I hope he reconsiders his involvement with doing A.I. comic books.
Clay Jones also commented on how it feels to be sold out by someone you didn’t just admire but had actively supported.
He’s got a longer statement on his SubStack, and not only is it some righteous fury, but note that Jones and Knight are having to supplement their income to keep going, while Kaepernick can apparently snap his fingers and come up with 4 mill to screw them.
Worst of all, he says he’s doing it to “free creators” and “democratize storytelling.” Yeah, free creators from their jobs. He’s cutting out the players in order to enrich the suits.
There’s sure no rear mirror on his Cadillac.
(If you missed this yesterday, go take a look today. Tomorrow may be too late.)
Yeah, well, they’re comin’ for you, too, Pablo.
Actually, I got a double-laugh from today’s Mr. Boffo: One for the gag itself, because what 99% of artists can get selling their own work is bird feed next to what a very, very few can get once they become “known.”
Also because I remember an art fair that banned several varieties of crap, but accidentally dropped a decimal point in their ad, thus announcing a $3000 entry fee.
As then-wife’s boss remarked, “Well, that oughta keep out the decoupage.”
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