Comics That Made the Groundhog Laugh Out Loud
Cidu Bill on Feb 2nd 2009
Filed in 9 Chickweed Lane, Beetle Bailey, Brooke McEldowney, Dave Whamond, Dinette Set, Mark Parisi, Mike Peters, Mother Goose, Off the Mark, books, comic strips, comics, comics that made us laugh out loud, humor, lol | 29 responses so far
duggie Feb 2nd 2009 at 12:37 pm 1
I LOL’ed at the Beetle Bailey. Clever!
The Ploughman Feb 2nd 2009 at 01:00 pm 2
The coloring on Beetle Bailey weirds me out. It looks like Sarge and whoever’s with him have driven from an old Black and White movie into a Technicolor one.
heather Feb 2nd 2009 at 01:10 pm 3
I confess I don’t really ‘get’ the Beetle Bailey… a joke about drawing perspective? But it doesn’t seem to follow…
Scott Feb 2nd 2009 at 01:17 pm 4
I LOLed about the bookstore one. It’s not just kids who fall for this. One sf publisher issued his paperbacks with numbers starting at 1, knowing that sf book collectors (like me) would want to get all of them.
Elyrest Feb 2nd 2009 at 01:25 pm 5
I LOL at the 9 Chickweed Lane when I first saw it. Gives a whole new meaning to “Talk Like A Pirate Day”.
Arrgh, matie!
Keera Feb 2nd 2009 at 03:53 pm 6
Having just finished a couple of months of physical therapy for an arm not happy with too much mouse use, I got a good laugh at the carpal tunnel joke.
Rasheed Feb 2nd 2009 at 05:41 pm 7
I would like the Beans’ strip more if I didn’t know what “refried beans” really meant.
Adam! Feb 2nd 2009 at 06:20 pm 8
Doesn’t it mean “well fried”? I think the substance abuse pun still works, just in a different way.
This Dinette Set makes my eyes bleed.
Elyrest Feb 2nd 2009 at 07:51 pm 9
Adam, refried when refering to beans doesn’t mean “well fried”. They are beans beans that have been cooked and then mashed and fried with seasonings. Most of the ones I’ve had it is difficult to tell that they are what I would think of as fried.
These beans here in their support group obviously have gotten a little “smashed”.
‘.
LD Feb 2nd 2009 at 08:42 pm 10
Someone please explain Beetle Bailey to me.
Dave Van Domelen Feb 2nd 2009 at 09:37 pm 11
Beetle sent Sarge to the vanishing point, LD.
And “refried” comes from a Spanish word that simply means “fried” but starts with “re-” (”refredo” or something like that).
Brian Leahy Feb 2nd 2009 at 10:12 pm 12
The funny thing is, I am 100% sure that the gag in Beetle Bailey gag was used in a BC strip decades ago.
BC and Peter walk down a road that tapers to 1-point perspective.
Panel 1, BC: You know what bothers me?
Panel 2, Peter: No, what?
Panel 3, BC: It bothers me who made this screwy road! (As in the BB strip, they’ve found that the road really DOES taper to a point, it’s not just perspective.)
tofor Feb 2nd 2009 at 11:36 pm 13
Brian-You are absolutely right. Only, the BC strip was much better done. I’ll have to look it up and see if I can find it.
furrykef Feb 3rd 2009 at 12:04 am 14
Dave: the word you’re looking for is “refrito”. (Just think of Fritos, ’cause they come from the same root.) And yeah, the “re-” prefix in that case has more to do with emphasis than with repetition.
Paul Feb 3rd 2009 at 02:59 am 15
I don’t get the book one. Anyone care to elaborate?
Powers Feb 3rd 2009 at 07:55 am 16
The person on the left treated encyclopedia volumes as if they were independent books in a series of novels — giving Patty one a year. I’m sure Patty eagerly looked forward to getting each new volume every year. (”Now I can finally look up Zanzibar!”)
Powers Feb 3rd 2009 at 07:56 am 17
And by “left”, I of course mean “right.”
Tom T. Feb 3rd 2009 at 07:57 am 18
The book joke is that the parents were so cheap they gave their daughter an encyclopedia at the rate of one volume a year.
chuckers Feb 3rd 2009 at 09:36 am 19
Cheap? A set of Encyclopedia Britannica costs about $US1,200 for
a 32 volume set. You almost have to buy them one volume at a time.
I tried to look up the price of the World Book Encyclopedia but their
website store is broken.
Of course DVDs of the same are much cheaper but there is something
to be said for being able to hold a book in your hands.
Matthew Feb 3rd 2009 at 10:43 am 20
The groundhog is an easy audience if it laughed at that 9 CHICKWEED LAND. I read that strip, but that particular entry was more stupidly silly than anything else.
The BEETLE BAILEY got a laugh from me. It was goofy & unexpected & so simple. That’s Killer in the jeep with Sarge.
The “Carpal Tunnel” made me snicker, too. It’s just so simply silly.
And the refried beans support group was the best of the bunch: surreali8stic & punning—thus, similar to BEETLE but different, too.
And I’m beginning to love THE DINETTE SET: the deadpan humor & characters, all the excess verbiage.
Replace CHICKWEED with today’s FRAZZ, and we have a good day at the comics.
Adam! Feb 3rd 2009 at 11:23 am 21
>>> Adam, refried when refering to beans doesn’t mean “well fried”.
No. As much as I hate to quote wikipedia: “The name is based on a mistranslation. In Mexican Spanish, the prefix re- is a form of emphasis meaning “very” or “well”, not to be confused with the English prefix re-, which indicates repetition. Thus, frijoles refritos, the Spanish name of this dish, would translate to English as “well-fried beans”"
Elyrest Feb 3rd 2009 at 12:29 pm 22
Adam, I don’t mind Wikipedia references, but I have never had refried beans that were well fried. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t somewhere and taking in all the other explanations I might have to admit that on this I am wrong. (This doesn’t cancel out other things that, most assuredly, I must be right about.)
Mateus Feb 3rd 2009 at 06:30 pm 23
Chuckers - There are student encyclopaedias geared to grade schoolers that can be purchased 1 by 1; the first is offered at a special price (1.99, usually), and the remainder were ~20.00 a piece. Oddly, the most likely place to find these were at grocery stores.
Of course, if you got one volume a year for 25, 26 years, the A volume would be horribly outdated by the time you’d gotten the set.
LD Feb 3rd 2009 at 10:41 pm 24
I appreciate the explanation, Dave, but I still don’t find the Beetle strip funny. Just sort of weird. Not weird enough to be funny, though.
Am I still missing something about it?
CIDU Bill Feb 3rd 2009 at 10:59 pm 25
I think the thing about visual humor, LD, is that it either strikes you funny right away or it doesn’t. Verbal humor can be appreciated once explained, but visual only gets that one shot.
Powers Feb 4th 2009 at 08:04 am 26
I’m still trying to figure out why the colorist on BB only colored the scenery and not the jeep or its passengers.
And Matthew, are you sure that’s Killer? I think it’s Cpl. Yo.
Matthew Feb 4th 2009 at 10:58 am 27
Powers, upon magnified examination, I believe that you are correct: Sarge’s companion is Corporal Yo. That makes a better joke, too.
My guess, Powers, is that the coloring emphasizes the surrealism of this strip. The land is flat & plain green. Sarge & Yo & the jeep are plain gray. It’s almost a dream.
LD, an explanation can help one understand what IS the joke, but does not necessarily result in one’s finding the joke funny, which is fine. As long as you have a sense of humor, you needn’t have another person’s sense of humor. I didn’t find the 9 CHICKWEED LANE strip above funny, but apparently others did. (They’re wrong, of course, but that’s just between us.)
Ian Osmond Feb 4th 2009 at 01:14 pm 28
Hmph. There are only thirteen books in the Series of Unfortunate Events. . . .
Well, thirteen in the MAIN series, anyway. I guess if you include the Unauthorized Autobiography, the Puzzling Puzzles, and the Notorious Notations, that’s sixteen, and then there are the other “Books By Lemony Snicket” such as “The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming,” which the entire fourth-grade Hebrew School class that I teach agrees is the best Hannukah story they ever read . . . but, honestly, I doubt there are even 25 of them even if you count all the subsidiary works.
I mean, so far.
Tocsnai Oct 16th 2009 at 10:23 pm 29
The Jolly Roger joke is dead on here, and smile-worthy.
Among other things, historical pirates were far more tolerant of homosexuality than navies of the time. The British would hang people for sodomy, whereas pirates didn’t care much. And yeah, spending months and months at sea in a wooden ship did lead to stuff, duh.
Pirates were also much more democratic, all things considered, than anyone else at sea.