comics that cracked me the hell up

Cafe Society
1

One of these days, soon…I’ll post a few of my strips to get opinions here. But I’ve been reading some of the older threads about comic strips and I have to agree with a lot of what I read.

What it boiled down to is what I had mentioned in a post a day or so ago…a lot of comics today just ain’t funny. They’re tired. Most are too old and out of touch with “today”. Calvin and Hobbes rocked. Oh, and Family Circus and Garfield suck.

Do you remember any comics that made you laugh out loud? I mean really laugh…bust a gut? I do…unfortunately they’re older strips, but i remember them.

Peanuts Forget the “Classic Peanuts” that they run nowadays. I think they should can it, and let Charlie Brown RIP. Don’t get me wrong, I love Peanuts. I just don’t agree with trying to wring every last cent out of it until people start hating it. Anyway, there was a sunday strip where Linus had to draw a family member for school and he chose Lucy. He was going to draw a huge open mouth on her, but was frightened to because she was standing next to him. For some reason that always cracked me up as a kid

Flash forward to Bloom County After being teased with the possibility of being frozen and stuffed after death by his friends, Opus is in bed saying his prayers ending in "…and if I die before I wake, LORD, for cryin’ out loud…" The first time i saw that in the paper I laughed so hard I blow snot in my rice krispies. Man, Bloom county was hilarious back in the day.

The Far side always made me chuckle but there are 2 that I remember causing me to fall over laughing. One was in a bar, the waitress talking to the cops. The place is all busted up and she’s telling the police “…then this little sailor guy whips out a can of spinach, this crazy music starts playing and well…LOOK AT THIS PLACE!”. Even my mother choked up at that one. Then there’s the all time favorite of two spiders building a web at the end of a playground sliding board and one says “if we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!”. Mom didn’t laugh at that one as hard as I did, but damn it was funny.

I know these lose a lot of “ooomph” in translation, but anyone else got any favorite comics that made you just crack the hell up?

2

The Calvin & Hobbes sequence in which Calvin is getting his school photo taken (with slicked-down hair re-sculpted by Hobbes) had me gasping for breath. “No, kid, don’t take your shirt off…”

3

I think my favorite C&H has Mom standing, looking down at Calvin, screaming “What are you doing???”

Calvin, sitting at the coffee table studded with nails, hammer raised to hit the next one, looks at Mom and says “Is this a trick question?”

4

My favorite Calvin & Hobbes is one where he had just done a self (or Hobbes)-inflicted-haircut, with predictable results. The next day, the first three panels have Calvin fantasizing about himself as a noir detective, in trenchcoat and fedora. Voice-over: “My name is Tracer Bullett. I’ve got two slugs in me…one’s whiskey, the other one’s lead. Suddenly, a dame walks in…you just know she’s gonna be trouble.” Then the fourth panel is back to reality, with Calvin’s mother demanding that he take off the hat he was wearing to hide the bad haircut.

Too many favorite Far Sides to list. I’ve done that in other threads.

Favorite Dilbert is the one where Dilbert and Dogbert are playing Scrabble. Dogbert puts down “N-E-A-N-S”. Dilbert tells him it isn’t a word. Dogbert says “I know, but I had some Ns to get rid of.” Dilbert tells him, “The Ns don’t justify the NEANS.” (and Dogbert responds, “I really just wanted to hear you say that”).

5

For me, Calvin and Hobbes will always be the measuring stick for comics. Nothing really comes close.

One that sticks in my mind.

Calvin’s mother is looking for him to get him to take a bath. She searches the house high and low. The last panel shows Calvin laying in the bathtub with the caption “she’ll never look here.”

6

I have a C&H tattoo. Yeah, I kinda liked it a little bit. :slight_smile:

I still think my favorite is when his Mom says “What did I tell you?!” after getting into mischieve. His reply - “Weren’t you listening either?”

The Far Side and Bloom County are still fighting for the number 2 spot.

7

Carrot Top. That guy is a riot. He really…

What?

Oh.

Well, as much as people complain about it today, Garfield has had its moments (albeit mainly when I read it as a kid). Any comic that has a character get mauled by leaf weasels (or even containing the phrase “leaf weasels”) gets a big ol’ laugh from me!

8

Pogo
Krazy Kat
(And yes, I read both of them when they were daily strips; Pogo was in the papers until the early 70s, and around that time our local paper ran daily reprints of Krazy Kat).

Barnaby (collections only).
Doonesbury
The Far Side
Dilbert

9

An old “Pogo” reprint stayed on my refrigerator for years, among a host of other clippings. I’d read it once a month or so, and laugh 'til I cried: the owl sees the turtle with a shrunken head, see, and runs to tell the alligator… well, you kinda had to be there. :slight_smile:

“Calvin and Hobbes” was consistently amazing.

I remember a great “Far Side”, where the frame is composed of two overlapping circles - to represent the reader looking through a pair of binoculars. The reader is looking at an eagle, who is glaring back at the reader from a nest full of human bones and binoculars.

The early Peanuts stuff, before Charles Schulz lost his muse, was killer. The later stuff was a terrible, transparent effort to bank upon the public appetite for “cute”. I think this influenced Bill Watterson and Gary Whatsisname to quit while they still had a shred of dignity, Og bless 'em.

10

Even the funny strips more often produce a smile from me than a laugh out loud. The only two strips I can remember for sure ever made me laugh out loud are Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, but there may well have been times when I LOL’ed at The Far Side, Bloom County, Foxtrot, Zits, maybe even Blondie a time or two.

I seem to recall laughing at the Calvin & Hobbes Draelin mentioned. But the one I for sure remember cracking up over—and like so many good strips, it depends a lot on the artwork—is one where Calvin’s sitting with his math homework, staring at a confusing problem. His face scrunches up a little, then it scrunches up some more, and finally he’s shambling off with his arms out in front of him and a truly grotesque look on his face, saying “THE LIVING DEAD DON’T NEED TO SOLVE WORD PROBLEMS!”

As for Peanuts…

I agree that Peanuts was killer when Schulz was in his prime, in the 60’s or 70’s, and went downhill later on, but I disagree as to why. Schulz never struck me as trying to be “cute”; he did keep trying new things and, if anything, he spent too much time on things that he may have found personally amusing but weren’t what the public loved about Peanuts and didn’t always work—like all those strips of Spike alone in the desert talking to a cactus, or the increasing emphasis on Rerun in the strip’s final years (though I found his enthusiasm for “underground comics” a bit amusing). And what humor there was, was often very dry.

But, as long as Schulz was drawing it, Peanuts never hit the point where it was, to me, never worth reading. [Picks up Peanuts book that happens to be lying around, looks through it] And there are strips from at least as late as 1991 that are capable of making me laugh out loud. A couple of examples:

Charlie Brown to Linus, as they’re walking home: WE HAVE SOMETHING NEW AT OUR HOUSE… WHEN I GET HOME FROM SCHOOL, MY DOG MEETS ME IN THE YARD WITH MILK AND COOKIES…
Then we see Snoopy, standing holding a tray with a glass on it (which is a little amusing in itself), and Charlie Brown says to Snoopy: "I SEE THE MILK, BUT WHERE ARE THE COOKIES?
Snoopy, rolling his eyes: THEY GOT TIRED OF WAITING SO THEY LEFT…

This next one only works if you’re familiar with some of the strip’s recurring themes…
Charlie Brown is standing in front of the classroom at school, holding a paper. Snoopy is standing beside him in his WWI Flying Ace outift.
Charlie Brown: THIS IS MY REPORT AS WRITTEN BY MY DOG ABOUT THE FLU EPIDEMIC IN 1918 DURING WORLD WAR I …
I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO READ IT TO YOU…
“THIS IS HOW THE FLU EPIDEMIC BEGAN”…
“IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT”

11

slow wave can be pretty funny at times.

Zippy has his moments too.

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In case nobody has seen it, the All Your Base Belong to Us is covered with a C&H bent.

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OK, you win, that’s DAMN funny. :stuck_out_tongue:

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When I was a kid–a little kid, I must have been in the first grade!*–there was a Bloom County (I remember it was a Sunday one) where Opus was to give a speech in front of a bunch of people, and was behind the podium, and kept trying to say “Ladies and Gentlemen” but it kept coming out humorously garbled.

This thing cracked. me. up. It was my first taste of the experience of being unable to breathe from laughing.

I have always wondered whether I would still find it funny were I to read it today, about twenty years later. (Really? Was it that long ago?)

Sadly, I’ve never been able to track down this particular “episode”** of the comic.

-FrL-

*I know this because I remember which house I was living in when I read this particular set of panels, and I was in that house only while I was in the first grade.

**Is there a better word for this than “episode?”

15

I recall reading a later “Peanuts” strip that made me laugh out loud in shock (which, for that fact alone, makes it unusual) because it was a rare example where Schulz actually got political. There was a series of strips featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy shopping in a store and, except for the last strip, I don’t remember the details except that Snoopy would point to something he wanted to buy only to be told by an off-panel clerk he couldn’t buy it because he was a dog or didn’t have a license of some sort. After being turned down a number of times, Snoopy points to an object and a frustrated Charlie Brown asks if it’s okay if his dog can buy that one. To their suprise, the clerk says “yes” and, in the last panel, we see Snoopy walking out of the store with a semi-automatic!

16

I recall there was a “Peanuts” strip which ended with Charlie Brown watching a sunrise, except, instead of the sun, it turned out to be the Mad Magazine dude with the words “What, Me Worry?” under him.

Was this the most surreal “Peanuts” ever?

-FrL-

17

Too many to list, but here’s a few :

One line from Bloom County “Feminine protection ?! What’s feminine protection ?! A chartreuse flamethrower ?!”

Also from Bloom County :

Kid : “I look in the mirror, and see the face of a statesman !”
Mirror : “A politician.”
Kid : “A statesman !”
Mirror : “A politician.”
Kid : “A statesman ! !”
Mirror : “A statesman . . . is a dead politican”
Mirror : “Lord knows, we need more statesman.”

From Far Side :

Two explorers glaring at each other, with a huge water buffalo unnoticed right behind them. One is saying “Buffalo breath ? Buffalo breath ?! Need I mention your incessant little grunting noises ?!”

A bunch of cavemen around a fire, screwing up their faces as they scorch their hands holding small animals in the flames. One is looking at a caveman with glasses, who’s holding his animal over the fire impaled on a sharp stick; “Hey ! Look what Zog do !”

A crazed looking man on a box, ranting to people “Vampires ! They’re everywhere ! Vampires !”. Some workers behind him are carrying a large windowpane, which reflects him, the street . . . and nothing else. They’re all vampires.

18

Anything involving Dogbert is very high on my list, but to me The Far Side represents the pinnacle of Comic Goodness.

One of my favourites involves a man looking out of his window at the neighbours across the road, who have an ICBM parked in the driveway.

The caption is “Wouldn’t you know it? Now the Hendersons have got The Bomb!” :smiley:

19

The Far Side has to rank as my number one. The comic with a hunter and gun-bearer out on the African Savanah -

“The situation has changed Jules. Take my Buffalo Gun and hand me my Mime Rifle”

Possibly a little obscure to people outside Australia/NZ these days but Footrot Flats was consistantly funny. Especially if, like me, you have relatives who are farmers.

20

When Calvin bit his mother. That panel is just so funny. And I agree, the haircut bit is probably the funniest continuing story I’ve ever read.

An early Garfield where he’s attempting to steal a hamburger off the BBQ. The last panel has him all charred and smoking and he thinks to a startled John “Mind if I smoke?” Or the time John walked in with a 5 o’clock shadow and Lyman asks him if he’s growing a beard. He says “Nope, ate a milkdud, kissed a cat.”

My favorite Far Side wasn’t published in the newspaper. Two cowboys are standing in front of an extremely shocked looking horse roasting over an open fire and explaining to their foreman “Well Jake here said he was hungry enough to eat one and I thought shoot, so am I and one thing led to another …”

In the first 3 books Mutts was always good at surprising me and making me laugh. Like when Millie makes Frank go out into the rain to find Mooch and Frank thinks to himself “He better appreciate this!” as he trudges through the rain. And the last shows Mooch in the house at the window watching Frank and thinking “Ha ha! I love it.”