The Zits from the 21st takes up a recurrent theme in the strip:
Over the years, Mark Liberman and I have posted about the Chatty Girls trope on the strip, retailing the (basically false) stereotype that women, and especially teenage girls, chatter on ceaselessly, overwhelming guys (with their laconic ways). One guy sandwiched between two girls doesn’t have a chance.
Billy Green asks me on Facebook if I’ve noticed that Dan Piraro has been occasionally recycling some of his old cartoons from the 80s and 90s. The new versions are very nearly identical to some of his earlier ones. Maybe, Billy wonders, if he’s revisiting some old favorites as he winds down towards his announced retirement.
[Added later, from Billy: It could just be that he wasn’t 100% happy with the originals and thought he could improve them.]
He’s unearthed five of these now. Here they come, new on the left, old on the right:
Yet another cartoon — and there are more in the queue.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with a cute play on the ambiguity of toy:
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from January 1st:
Either you find the story in the first four panels fascinating (in which case you might enjoy a beginning linguistics course) or you find it unspeakably boring (in which case you should probably stay away).
Today’s Zippy takes us to New Haven CT in times past:
(#1)
The Elm City has changed over the years, but here’s a photo of it roughly as it is in the comic strip:
(#2)
In the February Funny Times, an Ods Bodkins cartoon by Tim Lockley showing Batman at a booth with a sign offering
GUANO FOR SALE
with a rather disconcerted guy eying the sign. (I haven’t been able to find a copy of the cartoon, although I’ve found tons of other one-panel gag cartoons by Lockley, many of them playing with language (Ods Bodkins homepage here, very useful Ods Bodkins Facebook page here). I’ll post six of these below, but for the Batman cartoon — Batman definitely is a cartoon meme these days, by the way — I’ll have to rely on describing it.
In the February issue of Funny Times, this cartoon by political cartoonist Taylor Jones:
The third figure in the progression is Bruce Jenner, the fourth Caitlin Jenner.
Some words about Caitlin Jenner, and then a few on the Ascent of Man cartoon meme.
It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:
(#1)
Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).
Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.
So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
The nouns butt and booty overlap in their uses, and so do the verbs dial and call, and so do the related nouns dial and call. However… the compound nouns butt dial and booty call (also the related verbs butt dial and booty call) are both slang idioms, and they aren’t at all interchageable.
