I Am Curious (CIDU)

Cidu Bill on Feb 24th 2010

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He’s Curious George. He’s curious. I get it. But I don’t get it.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, Curious George, Dave Whamond, Reality Check, comic strips, comics, humor | 26 responses so far

26 Responses to “I Am Curious (CIDU)”

  1. Jeff S. Feb 24th 2010 at 12:36 am 1

    Well, the saying is NOT, “Monkey killed the cat.” George just benefits from not being a cat, otherwise he’d be dead as well.

  2. Kit Feb 24th 2010 at 12:49 am 2

    By George, Bill’s title is funnier than the original caption once again!

  3. Frank the curmudgeon Feb 24th 2010 at 12:51 am 3

    Yellow or Blue ?

  4. rain Feb 24th 2010 at 01:07 am 4

    Yellow Hat.

  5. Winter Wallaby Feb 24th 2010 at 01:39 am 5

    Excellent title! But I grow suspicious that you sometimes post comics that you do understand, when you have a title that’s too good to resist. . .

  6. Singapore Bill Feb 24th 2010 at 02:36 am 6

    The lawyer is arguing for a case of mistaken identity, saying it was Curiosity that did it, not Curious George. Given the way George is pounding the Caesars, I don’t think he’s making a good impression. Especially now that he is pouring the pitcher of wonderful, Clamato-y cocktails all over.

  7. mkilby Feb 24th 2010 at 03:26 am 7

    Shouldn’t the apologies have gone to Hans and Margret Rey? After all, George doesn’t care, he’s only a monkey. (I thought the subtitle was too obvious, spoiling the joke a bit.)

  8. George P Feb 24th 2010 at 06:07 am 8

    Maybe it’s like an insanity plea.

  9. Heather D Feb 24th 2010 at 08:43 am 9

    That’s a comic title I don’t understand… “I am Curious (CIDU)” — I don’t get it??

  10. Morris Keesan Feb 24th 2010 at 08:54 am 10

    Heather D, there was a fairly well-known Swedish film in the late 1960s named I Am Curious (Yellow). Its companion movie, I Am Curious (Blue), didn’t get as much notoriety. In the US, it was known mostly for containing nudity, and for being banned in Massachusetts for being pornographic. Wikipedia says that the case went to the US Supreme Court, and the film was found to not be obscene.

  11. Heather D Feb 24th 2010 at 09:31 am 11

    Thanks for the explanation. I’d never heard of it!

  12. Tullia Feb 24th 2010 at 11:57 am 12

    Gun ads: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Shocking twist! This gun did kill that person, and this person here did not kill that person. This cartoon: curiosity killed the cat, not George, who wields the curiosity.

    … Well, that plus “curiosity killed the cat.”

    I think I have a head cold.

  13. Darren S. A. George Feb 24th 2010 at 01:40 pm 13

    Tullia: Guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people.

  14. paperboy Feb 24th 2010 at 01:50 pm 14

    A riff on the “My client didn’t kill him; SOCIETY killed him” bit?

  15. CIDU Bill Feb 24th 2010 at 03:11 pm 15

    That’s an urban myth, Winter: every comic is here on its “merits.”

    Not that I’m never tempted, mind you…

  16. Jeff Schwarz Feb 24th 2010 at 04:57 pm 16

    “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they have a gun).” –Eddie Izzard

  17. paperboy Feb 24th 2010 at 05:53 pm 17

    “Guns don’t kill people, the government kills people.” - Dale Gribble aka Rusty Shackleford.

  18. firedmyass Feb 24th 2010 at 06:24 pm 18

    “Guns don’t kill people… dangerous minorities do.” – Glenn Beck

  19. arthur Feb 24th 2010 at 07:35 pm 19

    Guns don’t kill people … People texting people while driving do. - P.M. Shoemaker

  20. Kamino Neko Feb 24th 2010 at 08:13 pm 20

    I Am Curious (Yellow) has had a lot of titles riffing off it - inter-racial porn titles, particularly, but one of the more famous (at least in my circles) is a fairly ridiculous - in that earnest socially conscious but not well-thought-out way comics of the 70s often were - Lois Lane story called I Am Curious (Black), where Lois got herself changed into a black woman.

  21. paperboy Feb 24th 2010 at 10:00 pm 21

    Funny you should mention Lois Lane’s “I Am Curious (Black); someone recently sent a link to some of that story. http://abikuville.wordpress.com/glyphz/ (there’s other stuff, so scroll down)

  22. Jeff S. Feb 24th 2010 at 11:00 pm 22

    I Am Curious (George)
    not
    I Was Curious (Dead Cat)

  23. Chuck Feb 25th 2010 at 12:32 am 23

    The oysters were curious, and you know what happened to THEM.

  24. Rainey Feb 25th 2010 at 01:43 am 24

    Curiosity can kill you in some cases and save you in others. If you wish to learn about something, the knowledge gained can prevent you from making dangerous mistakes. Clearly, curiosity is a double edged sword. Just like seat belts.

  25. mitch4 Feb 25th 2010 at 07:21 am 25

    One of my more opaque email-signature lines was transcribed from a poster seen in I Am Curious.

    JA-röster NEJ-röster

    Högern 3 56
    Folkpartiet 50 19
    Centern 15 38
    Socialdem. 119 73
    Kommunisterna 9 1
    ___ ___
    196 187

    (We’ll see how badly the formatting gets mangled..)

  26. mitch4 Feb 26th 2010 at 11:06 am 26

    Well, nobody guessed correctly!

    It was the votes in the Swedish parliament, by party, for and against the Defense Policy bill.

    Part of the story in the films involved sending in their attractive, partially undressed model/journalist to interview politicians and man-in-the-street types about various high or low political matters, including the defense policy.

    The one I remembered from seeing Yellow in the 60s, and exaggerated into remembering as the overall pattern of the movie, was her asking people what their task was in the official occupation-sabotage policy. The idea is, if you’re officially a neutral country and maybe spout pacifist ideals, without building up a big armed forces what can you do to discourage some (unnamed) big bear-like neighboring country from marching in and taking you over. Answer: develop a plan for civilian industrial sabotage, so that your manufacturing base will be useless to the invader.

    So this guy being interviewed, for instance, was assigned to remove some controller gear from his plant’s assembly line and bury it in his sister-in-law’s garden. (This would be the serious political/sociological content needed to “redeem” the work from being merely salacious.)

    I incorrectly remembered the movie as being a series of more or less this same interview, an impression corrected only when I found it on DVD in the 90s and watched both versions. It’s actually a pretty well-done example of “nouvelle vague” tendencies moving outside France and rather interesting.

    I sometimes get impatient with “DVD Extras” and particularly the chatty version of flmmakers’ commentary tracks. So I value the ones that have an unusual take on how to do it or seem well thought out. (Like David Mamet on the DVD of “The Winslow Boy” stopping the recording at one point near the end so he could go look up a poem he wanted to read us. That was good, but his other DVDs have the usual sort of “cast and crew sitting around reminiscing” commentary track.) Anyway, I thought “I am Curious” did it well — instead of a long continuous commentary, it was set up to jump to selected scenes only; so we did get, say, costume designer remarks, but didn’t need to sit thru four hours of it, there would be just one or two scenes selected for that.

    I also thought I remembered that after this particular bury-the-controller-gear interview, they went to her place and did it under the dining-room table; but that must be some other non-Bergman 60s Swedish movie that made a splash in the U.S. (Does “Loves of A Blonde” have an under-the-table sex scene?)

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