dumb dumb dumb

B.C. is almost never genuinely funny anyway, but at least when there's lame jokes in the form of the recurring dictionary gag, as well as the "you know..." and "show me a..." bits, the lameness of the joke is blatant, and there's no pretense of an attempt at "sophisticated humour". The lameness of this strip, on the other hand, might be forgiven due to this self-awareness, except that it's not really a pun, and it's not really a joke, it's just plain dumb.


Broom Hilda also very rarely makes me laugh, and lately has been irritating on a regular basis. There's scantily clad women on the internet? Really? Wow, in a few more years there might actually be porn on the internet, and won't that be a disaster for North American values?

Okay, so let's say that the underlying "joke" of the opening panel is that it's a curmudgeonly old lady complaining about something modern. That might be alright if it wasn't for the fact that this exact same strip could have appeared 30 years ago with television as the subject instead of the internet. There are plenty of things on the internet for old fuddy-duddies to whine about, and the source of Broomie's ire is way down at the bottom of the list. And the follow-up "joke" is just plain stupid, and just plain not funny. What an utterly pointless strip.

Gary Coleman eat your heart out...

Four hump day strips... come on everybody, do the humpty hump!

Other comic bloggers have mentioned how Charles Schulz was way ahead of his time with Peanuts, so I guess it's my turn.

This strip was first printed in 1959. That's 47 years ago, people, long before the phrase "politically correct" meant anything.

I only discovered Lio recently, and most days it's made of pure awesome. Today is one of those days.


Brewster Rocket, on the other hand, is almost never made of pure awesome, but it's still silly fun that manages to squeeze out a decent gag now and then. Pamela's comment in the last panel sounds like it should be the name of a self-help book.


And finally, I don't think I've mentioned 9 Chickweed Lane here before, but it's definitely one of the better strips out there. Like Brewster Rocket, I started following it when I filled in for Matt for a few days, and I'm so glad I did. Today's strip is an example of how Brooke McEldowney expertly plays with the medium to produce a "joke" so subtle yet so powerful.


Now go outside and play!

TV Memories

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who remembers that show.

Devices

In this blog I don't often talk very much about the "mechanics" of comic strips. The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch does a pretty good job of that, as do a handful of others, but I usually just talk about the content and whether or not I find it amusing and stuff like that... but today's On The FastTrack does something very I've never seen before, and I had to comment on it:

In case you didn't notice, the first and third panels are in colour, and the middle panel isn't. Now, having colour in the daily strips is a relatively modern thing, when I was a kid only the Sunday comics were coloured, but these days some newspapers have coloured comics all week, and whether or not you see them in colour online depends on, among other things, which syndicate owns that title. I don't know a whole lot about the inside of the comic strip business, so I don't know if the cartoonists submit both coloured and non-coloured versions of each strip to their syndicate, or if the syndicates get someone else to colour them, so if this is laziness, I don't know who's the one being lazy... but, to be fair, it's nowhere near as lazy as the old stand-by, the silhouette.

Monday miscellany (plus bonus Lio)

I've had a busy week, but here's some quick notes on 3 strips from Monday:


Um... what? Born Loser is never really that funny to start with, but this is just pointless.


You're not alone, little one, I don't get it either.


I can't tell, is the dog's tail wagging in every panel, or is it just a fluffy tail? It would make sense for it to be wagging, because if a dog sees a bird and doesn't chase it, it would at least wag its tail.

And finally, a fun little reference strip from yesterday's Lio:

*snerk*

Mother Goose & Grimm isn't exactly one of the best comics out there (although it does occasionally have some pretty good moments, especially on Sundays), Family Circus is one of the worst comics out there, and the gag here is pretty lame... but somehow it just works.

Well, it works for me, anyway.

You warthog-faced buffoon...

Anyone who's a fan of the movie The Princess Bride will likely notice something suspicious about today's Overboard



The primary, more overt reason to use the phrase "to the ouch" is the comedic impact. The word "ouch" is not a noun, it's an interjection, so "to the ouch" has the same silliness factor as if you asked someone to pass you a woah, or keep an eye on the zoom. However, I have a feeling that the real reason the phrase was used is because "to the pain" is the basis of a memorable scene in The Princess Bride. If Chip Dunham thought that using a different word would prevent people noticing this similarity, and accusing him of unoriginality, he was mistaken. I noticed, and I know I can't be the only one. Sorry, Chip, the next time you try to rip off someone else's idea and turn it into a lame gag, you'll have to do a better job of trying to conceal it.