Another balloon-free classic featuring teenage angst from 1999. Sometimes, when you’re a cartoonist, you just have to laugh. Laugh ruefully, I mean. This cartoon reminds me of another I drew a few years back. Arlo is working a crossword puzzle and is groping for a four-letter word that means Hawaiian folk dance. Through four panels, he’s stumped, and oblivious to Janis gyrating in the background, similar to Arlo in the second panel above. After the cartoon appears in newspapers, I get a snippy email from someone who writes, “I don’t know what that woman in the background is supposed to be doing, but it sure isn’t the hula.” As Steve Martin might have said at one time, “Well, excuuuuse me!” What is about comic strips that make some people so serious?
153 responses to “Comforting Thought”
What I like about Arlo is he is never serious (for any lenght of time anyway).
I’d be willing to bet that woman grew up in household where the idea of humor is limited misfortune to others.
Luddie looks very attentive, maybe he’ll catch on!
Jimmy, my Dad wasn’t a big comics fan but he once commented about how some people become so intense and involved that they become verbally abusive and emotionally knotted over a comic strip, a headline, or any of a thousand such unrelated things. [Dad was a great philosopher even though it took me years to realize the fact!] He felt that such irrationality was not caused by the comic strip, headline, etc. but by a huge trove of insecurity, anger and angst [my word, not his] in their own real-time lives. Did that make sense? I think it’s like some militant Muslims getting all bent out of shape over a cartoon of a Teddy Bear. Uh oh! Here they come with a big stake and a lot of fire! And, Ghost, that was correctly speeled with an “e” rather than an “i” so don’t get all pokey with me.
p.s. 1999? I didn’t realize Ludwig had been around that long! He’s certainly aged well!
Debbie, you want Ghost to change his name to Pokeyman? I thought Pokeyman was a Jamaican proctologist? What’s with the double- and non-posting? Hi, Mindy.
Shelly, I believe you are thinking of Dr. Pokémon.
What is it about comic strips that make some people so serious? I don’t know that. But I think Debbe and I do know where a lot of them hang out.
BTW, the word “pokies” applies much more often than “pokey” does, as they almost always travel in pairs.
“What is about comic strips that make some people so serious?”
I’m thinking the answer is that people think what you do is easy. And while you do make it look easy, if it really was easy then everyone would do it.
The rest of us ignore the serious ones and simply enjoy the cartoons and the ride!
You should have asked the snippy emailer to please draw a woman doing the hula correctly and that you would post it as a “correction”!
Not that Husband would try to teach a cat to hula, but I’m pretty sure that from time to time all our kids have thought they were growing up in a funny farm.
Didn’t someone once say that “comedy is serious business”? If they didn’t, they should have.
Speaking of cats, the person who was supposed to lend me a trap/cage to get the outside cats to the vet didn’t, and now we have two litters of kittens, less than a week old. I’ve counted a total of five kittens, and I hope that’s all, and might have a home for three of them with a friend who needs barn cats.
“Teaching the cat to hula” has become my go-to phrase for “hanging out and wasting time”.
Two great silly retro strips in a row!
I think the people who get overly serious about comic strips are either (1) basically humorless, or (2) the kind of people who never pass up an opportunity to promote an agenda. Or both. For example, if the infamous “Arlo and the tick” series had been run this week, I can almost guarantee that someone over on The Dark Side would have said something that would have set off an acrimonious debate about whether global warming/climate change is causing an increase in the tick population. If you don’t believe that, please note that yesterday’s “gorgeous day” cartoon led to a somewhat heated (no pun intended) debate about global warming/climate change.
I think I just got too serious. But then I thought about the “Arlo and the tick” series again and got over it. 🙂
Jimmy, you need to rerun those cartoons here. Seriously.
Ghost,
Exactly! I try not to read the comments over there, as there sure seem to be lot of humor-challenged folks writing them. The good thing about the iPad app for that site is it doesn’t show the comments…but my app has been crashing all week, so I have to read themonthe regular website. Oh, well…at least the comments here are fun! And have seious discussions of important things, like pokies! 🙂
I’m going to have to go to the “Dark Side” just to see if I should make rude comments to the people making rude comments. At least I think, judging from what is said here, that they are somewhat radical there. I’m just sayin’…
In any case, John says that children not raised in a periodic funny farm miss a great part of the growing process and often don’t turn out right…like he, and I, and Ginger, and Shelly, and most everyone here. Nuff said. Oh, yeah, and I include the Evil Twin Sister in that, Ghost. So, Trapper Jean, odds are you have “good and normal” kids. 😀
Today is the Day of Days…thank you, General Eisenhower…when I launch my full and hopefully final offensive against Demon Bamboo. It’s all yellow, not a speck of green, and I think hope pray beg that I’ve killed the beast and am merely going to be rooting out the roots, so to speak. John is off “moving rocks” somewhere, Ginger is shopping for supper, her turn to cook, and Shelly said that she’d stop by ASAP and give me a hand. I don’t know if I want to share the thrill of victory. God knows I’ve suffered the agony of defeat by myself…and now I hasten forward to do battle, hoo yah!
First it was chickens dancing on tables, now cats doing the hula. Is this a ploy to turn this blog into a dancing animal site?
Frankly-
What do you mean “turn?”
Every now and again I do like to poke a stick into the eye of one or more of the humorless trolls the inhabit the Dark Side but primarily I ignore them.
I do comment fairly regularly on both of Greg Craven’s comics, but the commenters there are primarily sane (in the same way the Villagers are sane, ie rarely doth a knuckle-dragger or troll dare show his or her ugly face) and Greg even tosses in a comment or two many days.
Hold on a second, I have to go rearrange my sock drawer.
Remember, Mindy, an ancient wise man from the Orient once said: “Do not awaken a sleeping tiger. And Mindy, that goes double for bamboo.”
The same ancient wise man also said, “Go and venture to the dim realm of The Dark Side at risk of your own peril. And yes, I realize that wise saying is shot full of redundancies or whatever you call them.”
Bryan, I have to say that comments on “That is Priceless” sometimes rival that of its creator for humor content. I even jump in once in awhile, when I feel like I can keep up with them, the only place beside A&J where I do that.
It isn’t comic strips. It’s people.
“Arlo and the tick”- for a moment I imagined a comic titled “Arlo and the Tick”. Now THAT would have been an exercise in absurdity!
Demon Bamboo had some KIA but some was lying in wait to ambush me, filthy lousy Viet Bamboo animals! I did dig out a single root, 27 ft 9 13/16 inches [not counting the twists and curves in between ends], a new record. I called Boone & Crockett but they said I’d dug it up out of season. The Ripley’s Museum in Knoxville just laughed at me. Tonight I’m going to shove the root into their heat pump. Actually, John suggested having it stuffed and mounted. I have a better suggestion for both.
Frankly I think Mindy is full of bamboozle.
Oooooooh! Another punster! I like that!