Also Judge Frump kept expecting President Grant to put him on the Supreme Court.
It could be the OP didn’t recall exactly what the sheriff said. The two phrases are similar.
I think my answer is dead on.
“They’re staging an embalmathon in Dodge City to raise fund to cure insomnia among toe taggers.”
My guess is that to a 90 year old dude this qualifies as an outlandish concept that satisfies the requirements for the humorous content and ingenuity. The last two panels were for style and to let it sink in. Embalmathon is a big novel word coinage and you aren’t going to put much more meaning into a daily newspaper strip. When a guy comes up with that, at 90, I guess his wad is spent.
There is no joke in there otherwise.
I never read daily funnies anymore.
As an accepted custom in the US. It was unusual enough before that, that every town didn’t have someone whose job was “undertaker.”
I also liked Bucolic Buffalo. He doesn’t talk much, but don’t upset him!
My sister the pharmacist kept a copy of a strip from many years ago. It was one of those “Indian of the Month” awards the Chief made. He asked the tribes pharmacist was got him interested in agriculture.
ME NON LIKUM LIl MANS! HATUM DUTS!
No, I was typing my quote in directly while looking at the book. (It’s in one of the paperbacks.)
If you post a poll, I’m voting for the sheriff cutting off the word “Tombstone.”
The joke requires the special knowledge of Dodge City being adjacent to Tombstone, but regular readers of the strip would know that.
If the cartoonist wanted to be a little more “D’uh” with the punchline, he could have had the sheriff cut off CC’s “I’ll be in–” with “Tombstone, I know.*”
*Yes, I realize that technically that sentence should have a semi-colon and not a comma, but I would use a comma to get the proper delivery in the reader’s head.
We have the disadvantage of not being able to see the sheriff’s facial expression, which might shed some light on what he’s getting at.
“I CAN GUESS!” repeated and in all caps suggests to me he has raised his voice and is speaking very quickly, as if to stave off hearing something he’d rather not hear, perhaps in a TMI vein.
“…being held at…” suggests a location in town. If it were in another town it would be “…being held in…”
None of the explanations proposed in this thread ring true to me, but I’m afraid I don’t have any kind of satisfactory explanation either.
Oh, I dunno, I think Tombstone is pretty good. It’s like if someone said he was going to Queens, NY for a plumbers convention, and if you want him, you can reach him at–Flushing.
Now that’s a good one. 
I can see some sense to Tombstone, but the use of “at” rather than “in” doesn’t sound quite right.
The answer he cut off was “SDMB” and he was right.
Huh? Was this an in-joke in the strip, or something? The real-life Dodge City and Tombstone are hundreds of miles apart.
Are they? I think of them together, but I don’t know much about the West (and I should, so that’s my shame), but I think a lot of people think of them as close, or connected, or something.
I still don’t think it’s “the morgue.”
“The morgue” would be the punchline if the undertaker was going over to the newspaper office, and if you needed him, he’d be at the :drumroll: MORGUE.
It’s not a punchline for the undertaker to be at the literal morgue.
Well, Wyatt Earp was a peace officer in both locations as to a lesser extent were a couple of his brothers. So I suppose that is a connection.
Dodge used to have a self-appointed redeemer of Dodge City. Any time someone would insult the city, he would fire off a letter saying all the good points of the Western Kansas town. Like if someone said after a shooting in L.A. or Detroit or somewhere, “For God’s sake this isn’t Dodge City.” He would regularly send his letters to television shows, movie companies, talk shows or whatever. I wonder after this comic strip came out if he sent one of his letters to the strip’s creator.
The original joke was written decades ago, not when Ryan was 90.
The only thing I can think of is “The KO Corral”. KO being an acronym for “knock out” (cure insomnia), and the OK Corral being the site of that famous gunfight. However, the OK Corral is in Tombstone, which is indeed really far from Dodge City.
OK, 70. Same thing. The gag ended at panel 2. Get over it.
This seems to be the prevailing thought here: there isn’t any “hidden ghastly pun,” and thus the appearance of a set-up is spurious.
I’m comforted, because I thought it was one of those things everybody was going to get instead of me.
“Get over it” is the wrong advice. The matter needed to be discussed, so that we could understand that we all don’t see a clever “gotcha” pun wafting in the ether. Instead of “Get over it,” you could say, more charitably, “…and that’s the way it is.”
Many of Tumbleweeds’ punch-lines are weak and lame. “Poy, you should hear that sucker tinkle.” Really weak sauce. But at least it’s clear what Oglestunker is talking about when he describes “Oglestunker Falls.” It’s a riff on Niagara’s roar. A mega-weak and lame-o riff, but at least it’s clear.
So, the strip had a dud here. Ah, well! It’s given me many and many a grin, and remains one of my most very fave comics of all time.
Thank you everyone for helping defuse this bomb!
Well I’m here and was interested in what it was. “Get over it” was a little take off on a recently deceased SCJ.
Look at the post above my last one. I am getting more of a boot out of the concept of that being the actual punchline to a gag that than any strip I’ve seen recently. Like the strip was written for Rube Goldbergs eyes only. We’ve got to relax, no?