I’m guessing it’s an April Fool’s joke that Bill Amend and Darby Conley cooked up, but I wonder whether it’s a joke that one of them played on the other, or that both of them are playing on their readers. Anyway, the two strips are almost identical today.
What, no links? You’re not going to make me go looking for stuff on the internets, are you?
Okay, I went looking anyway.
I imagine those links will be good only today.
If the authors didn’t plan that out, that’s one freaking amazing coincidence. They really are almost exactly the same.
Pearls Before Swine, too. It looks like a vast write-winged conspiracy.
Here’s a link for Pearls Before Swine.
Any others?
Sorry about that, Kyla! I was AWFK, and when I got back and saw your first post, you had already tracked down the links. Those links will get you to comics from previous days, so you can use them even after today to get back to today’s comics.
I have all three in my daily paper, but I’d love to know if anyone else is is on the joke.
The Chicago Trib only has Get Fuzzy and Fox Trot, and no other cartoons in that paper are in on the gag.
OK, so we found three. Anybody else come across any other comics participating in this?
The joke explained, since I am so slow. 
Warning: explaing a joke takes all the fun out of it. So he was punched by a ghost and not the person standing next to him, since ghost are real, and apperently, take any order that comes along. Ha!
Shades of The Aristocrats - the movie shown at Sundance, with 100 comics all telling their version of the same joke.
Dude . . . are you in the same thread I’m in?
April Fool!
Jeez, I’m just trying to make to suck the humor out of it, no big deal. 
But, my post seems to sum up what happens in Pearls Before Swine
Simply substitute “him” for “her”, and you have Foxtrot.. Sure the joke is that they all have the same concept, but it seems like I am either reading the strip while under the influence of being crazy, or I have described it accurately.
Your link does not take me to a Cathy that mirrors the other jokes.
Genghis Bob, nicely done.
Huh?
Stupid April Fools Day. That’s it, I’m not posting anything else today!
I read the first-layer joke… (the situation in any one of the strips, not the meta-joke that they’re all doing the same thing except for character and minor dialog variations) differently…
[spoiler]Character #1 is fooling around with a ouija board. Character #2, presumably a usual foil, shows up. Character #1 pretends to get a message from a ‘spirit of the beyond’, asking for some sort of violent and hurtful act aimed at character #2. Character #1 obliges, unshown.
Character #2, completely missing the fact that character #1 has faked the message to have an excuse to hit him/her, replies with a comment along the lines that they were surprised ghosts would have reason to ask for him/her to be hurt. Character #1 fakes an appreciative message from his(/her?) ‘ghosts’[/spoiler]
“Once you dissect a joke, the situation is the same as if you’d dissected a frog: it’s dead.”