In Darby Conley’s comic strip Get Fuzzy, Bucky Katt often comments on his dream to eat a monkey. Is there any reason why he thinks a monkey would taste good (has he ever explained), or is this just a very funny unexplained character trait for a very funny character?
(I must say this urge is the topic of one of my favorite strips: where Bucky believes “Planet of the Apes” is some sort of a restaurant.)
Have they ever explained the single fang? Is it Darby Conley’s tribute to Geneisha, the Remover of Obstacles who has only one tusk?
I don’t think they ever explained his fang, other than it’s apparently why he’s called Bucky. And once the ferret knocked his tooth out, but the dentist put it back.
And I don’t think he’s explained Bucky’s obsession with monkeys, either – just that it’s his dream to eat a monkey. In light of that obsession, I thought this strip was really funny:
http://www.comics.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/getfuzzy-20030718.html
Heh. Rhesus Pieces.
In reply to the strip you posted, I don’t know why Rob won’t let Bucky eat some of the Chunky Monkey ice cream. How would it hurt Bucky?
Nah, he’s named after Buck O’Neal, the Negro League baseball player. And Satchel is named after Satchel Page
Maybe because milk is bad for adult cats?
Rule #125 of comedy (Skelton’s Corollary)*: it’s funnier if it’s not explained.
*“I just do 'em. I don’t explain 'em.” – Red Skelton
Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream is banana flavored ice cream with walnuts and big hunks of chocolate.
Chocolate is toxic as hell to dogs and cats.
Well, that explains it.
I believe that the “Bucky wants to eat a monkey” gag started with a Sunday strip in which Bucky revealed that he thought that fish eat monkey. Darby Conley apparently liked that gag, and riffs on it every now and then.
Probably irrelevent, but perhaps Conley is a fan of Larry Niven’s science fiction stories about the Kzinti: - tigerlike alien conquerers who have a fondness for “monkey meat”.
I also believe that felines in the jungle always enjoy a tasty primate. Bucky does always identify with his larger distant kinfolk.
What about talking dogs and cats who walk on their hind legs? Perhaps their physiology is different?
Milk makes my cat puke everywhere. I assume Bucky would have a similar reaction, maybe more so because cartoon animals have that tendency to exaggerate the reactions one might expect.
Ironically, a cat puking a person will make milk fly out of my nose.
I believe that milk tends to make adult cats get diarrhea.
Speaking as a man who has in the past accessorized his home with a box of shit, how would anyone know if a cat had diarrhea?
Could you explain that to mine? He manages to drink some of my milk almost everyday while I’m eating lunch. It’s particulary hard when I’m eating a tuna sandwich and I can’t hold/eat both at the same time.
He hasn’t gotten sick yet, but it’s damn annoying.
Cats can’t digest lactose very well, nor do they digest sucrose well, so the combination would probably make him vomit and certainly give him the shits. (Have you ever smelled cat diarrhea? Oy.) Besides, cats also can’t break down theobromine, which makes chocolate toxic to them.
As for the monkey thing, well, monkeys are funny. Cats do one of three things with everything: they sleep on it, swat it around, or try to eat it. If you’re going to work monkeys into a strip about a cat, trying to eat one makes a lot more sense than sleeping on it or smacking it around. That, and monkeys are just far enough out of the range of things cats normally lust after (birds, squirrels, the chihuahua next door) that you snicker and say, “A monkey? Why a monkey of all things?”
I always assumed it was a toned-down version of Bucky’s hostility toward humans.