Again, the punchline isn’t where it is, but what’s being done there.
Think about what Embalmathon means… a whole convention hall of morticians draining blood out of corpses, massaging the limbs, and using bellows to suck embalming fluid into their circulatory systems. Think of the mess they’re making, the gory stuff everywhere, the mistakes they have to repair, how bad it must smell… that’s what the sheriff is reacting to.
Then he should say something like “I’ve heard enough!” not “I can guess [the location]!”
I’m thinking that there must be some pun along the lines of coroners/corners (if coroners can be called toe-taggers). Is there some well known spot in Dodge City with “corner” in its name, that can somehow be tied to insomnia? Like is there a “red eye corner” or something like that.
Manduck: That’s what I was hoping for, but it doesn’t seem to be so.
RivkahChaya: Exactly: if the Sheriff had been grossed out by visualizing the description, he would have said, “Enough, already!” But “I can guess” really implies that there’s something to be guessed.
The word coroner doesn’t appear in the strip. A pun like that wouldn’t be sufficient to make a strip funny since no one is reading his mind. For that to work it would need to be a lot more “accessible” to a normal reader with very little special knowledge. Most newspapers, at least when I heard the statistic, were written for 6th grade level readers. Comics are directed even lower I would imagine.
I can’t even find a good map of Dodge City online.
It’s not what he said. It’s the reason why he said it. He wanted Claude to stop giving him TMI.
This.
I only remember a few individual Tumbleweeds cartoons, but one of them ranks among my all-time favorite cartoons period, and I’d hazard a guess Native Americans got a smile out of it as well.
The Pony Express rider is galloping furiously. He sees a historical marker in the middle of nowhere, and reins in to read it.
“THIS MARKER ERECTED BY THE POOHAWK INDIANS, IN HONOR OF THOSE PALEFACES WHO STOPPED TO READ IT, AND, WHILE DOING SO, WERE AMBUSHED.”
Next frame you see him galloping furiously away, arrows sticking through his hat, screaming “No fair! No fair!”
This might be the explanation. It should have ended with him looking at the 4th wall pleadingly just as he was about to be scalped, like Wile E coyote.
No offense but maybe this strip had a tendency towards spoiling the gag in the last panel?
One of his finest!
No, not really. It tends to have a fairly strongly pronounced last-panel gag. It ain’t always very funny; it’s often vaguely wry. It’s quite often visual in nature.
Tumbleweeds and Ace, the Gambler, are talking about whether it’s the heat or the humidity. In the last panel, their hats have completely wilted, sagging down around their shoulders. “I would be inclined to say it is the latter.”
It ain’t the Round Table at the Algonquin, but it’s cute, and good enough for a smile.