A friend of mine had a bunch of Family Circus books years ago and one night we were up drinking and reading through these (which in some cases made them actually funny). I remember we came across this cartoon and thought it was hilarious based on some of the guesses we were making about it.
Years later, I still have no idea what this means. What’s your guess/answer?
All the seats in the room are taken because they have guests over.
Jeffy: “Daddy, where can I sit?”
Daddy: “Sit on your fucking thumb, you little shit!”
Jeffy: “I don’t WANT to sit on my thumb, Daddy!”
Bill Keane was crippled by the censors his entire career. He would constantly churn out gold, then the censors would sanitize his work beyond all recognition. If you ever get a chance to see some of his uncensored works, it will blow your mind.
Man was a misunderstood genius.
The best sane explanation I can think of is that it’s supposed to be a way of preventing thumb-sucking.
The only definition I have heard is that it means “to do nothing.” E.g. context here. So Jeffy is being told to calm down and stop fidgeting perhaps.
Billy, meanwhile, is smugly enjoying Jeffy’s tantrum.
That was my guess too before looking at the actual comic. The thumb-sucking explanation doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the art, which shows a party or some other gathering going on in the house with everyone seated but an agitated looking Billy.
A bit of research suggests that the correct phrase is “Sit on your thumb and spin.”
O.K., seriously, this board is going to hell in a hand basket. Billy is seated in the rocking chair with a smug-ass look on his face. P.J. is on Daddy’s lap, Dolly is on Mommy’s lap. All the other seats are taken by the guests.
Jeffy is the agitated one.
He is upset because there is nowhere to sit. Upon complaining that there is nowhere to sit, his emotionally abusive father sarcastically suggested that he sit on his thumb- thus provoking the quoted outburst.
I think bienville’s pretty close, actually. I’ve heard, “Go sit on your thumbs” used as an instruction to a fidgety child. If they’re sitting, they’re not running around. And if they’re sitting on their thumbs, they can’t touch anything. In this comic, it’s an adult party, and Jeffy is bored. His dad tells his to go sit on his thumbs: go be quiet and out-of-the-way while mom and dad enjoy some grown-up company. Jeffy is taking it literally and whining about it.
Isn’t there a poster here who always comes up with one of these in response to just about any issue that ever comes up? Perhaps that poster has the answer to this.
Unfortunately, we the reader have no idea if Jeffy is taking it literally, since if he understood that the expression actually meant just to sit quietly, an expected response would be… “I don’t WANT to sit on my thumb, Daddy”. With every fiber of my being, I am praying to a creator I do not believe in that this comic was not meant to be funny.
That would be the now-banned Markxxx.
So is the thumb the same “it” that they were always telling people to sit on in Happy Days?
If he had been told to sit on his thumbs I would buy this - the strip is specific to ‘one thumb’
Is it possible that the tag line got switched with another comic’s? That happened to The Far Side, with similar head-scratching results.
Oh boy! Hamsters again!
