CSotD: Accentuate the trivial, eliminate the meaningful …
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Okay, here's what I've been needing: Brewster Rockit serves up a Monday morning comic that is impossible to overthink. Pure silliness is a very good thing and thank god I'm off to a start with no serious thoughts whatsoever.
Let's keep it that way.
Juxtaposition of the Sound Effects
See? It's not that hard to avoid serious thought. Every day does not have to be an authoritative analysis of our position relative to the depth of the Big Muddy.
Though you'll notice I arranged them so it went from 5 repetitions to 4 to 3. Or maybe you wouldn't have noticed that.
Which means that only Bottomliners was trivial. Poptropica was quadrivial, and I don't know the term for what Zoe has done in Baby Blues but I certainly agree with Wanda that it requires immediate attention.
None of this amounts to serious thought. I'm sticking to my diet.
Here's another silly one — the Piranha Club — which relies on a number of running gags, including the cheapskate sort of humor that sets up this opportunity for the reader to supply the next line.
And not only will Enos save a bundle, but how often do you get to study under a Cabinet Secretary?
Wait, wait … okay … let's just back away from the political humor.
For instance, I'm not touching today's Non Sequitur because I don't want to get into even that silly a level of satirical commentary.
Plus I can't quite get the phrasing and timing right for a wisecrack about how the demise of Ringling Brothers has to do with the damage it was doing to elephants, but I can't get over the notion that there's a good joke about the GOP in there somewhere, perhaps linked to the drunken, vicious clowns in Dumbo and …
Not gonna do it. Skip ahead.
Here we go, and thank god the people in today's Rhymes with Orange are living in yurts and not tepees, because, if they were tepees, it would trigger some serious reflections on Oglalla culture.
I recently read a biography of Crazy Horse that examined his life from within his own societal setting, which is quite a departure from the usual, and one of the things that repeatedly came up was that the more prominent and wealthy people within an Oglalla community were not only obligated in a vague moral sense to help the poor but that it was actually required by some fairly unbreakable conventions.
What this meant was not simply that, when you got a new cover for your tepee, you donated the old one to an elderly widow or a poor family, which of course you would do anyway, but that, upon a marriage or the birth of a child or promotion to a role of prominence, you made significant donations to the poor and not just of old stuff you didn't need anymore.
We're talking ponies and large quantities of food and other useful, necessary, valuable items.
"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required" was deeply embedded in their culture long before any Black Robes wandered by the camp, such that, when the village moved, those with less were assisted by their more fortunate neighbors and so therefore the question that is raised here …
goddammit.
Never mind. They weren't even tepees. They were yurts.
And I'm sure Mongolian society has it all covered, too, but it was only a joke.
Let's just skip to the next cartoon.
And, no, not Bizarro, because they just found a skull in a cave in Portugal that raises questions about the ancestry of Neanderthals and there's been enough about them recently anyway that the simple story that Lucy came out of Africa and eventually became a modern human has morphed into this totally complex thing about Neanderthals and homo erectus and homo sapiens such that I wish I could wipe out the things I thought I knew about it, become a kid again and take biology all over, perhaps in about 25 years when they've got some of this sorted out.
And when it's once more legal to teach biology in public schools.
So, no. Bizarro is right out.
I'll simply point out that we capitalize Neanderthal because they're named for the Neandertal region of Germany.
If you weren't already wondering about that, now you don't have to.
Okay, now, here we go!
Bug Martini serves one up that I don't have to overthink and, in fact, am inclined to underthink, because I've recently covered the whole issue of cultural references and the demographics at which they are aimed, so there's no need to go back to that.
The song came out when I was 20 and at about the time my freak flag was about as far up the pole as it was going to go, but I've since tried soft-pedalling it and found that being a freak has very little to do with haircuts and that trying to hide it is totally futile.
And then I read Peter Coyote, who was a much bigger freak than I ever dreamt of being, and I decided none of it really mattered and that, of all the things I shouldn't overthink, that was first on the list.
Because you needn't embrace it or reject it. The people who were not freaks would smell you out anyway, and so would the people who were freaks.
The first doesn't matter; the second is a good thing.
So group hug and I'll see you tomorrow.
Now scratch that earlier earworm:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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