The “doughnut” gag is alluding to a Simpsons ep. IINM. But these strips, trying to be clever
but just coming across as tired, is why I dropped Dilbert from my comics queue at the
Houston Chron several months ago.
I wonder if it’ll be a segue into a strip about Asok’s mysterious psychic powers…
Okay, as I suspected; over-sensitivity on my part. I did find it kind of funny that Wally sold the rest of his soul for a doughnut, and called it a great day.
It may seem shocking to featherlou, but some employers in real life (if you call this living;)) routinely mess with employees’ souls. The usual ploy is, “If you wanna work here, you have to join my church.” Jewish Cadets at the US Air Force Academy were told by instructors not only that they were surely going to Hell, but they’d never get anywhere in the AF if they didn’t get saved.
Way too high.
Catbert is just going around making nonsense up to toy with people. Because he can. And because people in the strip (and I guess outside as well) are pretty gullible.
It’s like Dogbert and his “Out out demons of stupidity” magic.
All I know is, the next cat I see with a bubble wand is getting his a$$ kicked around the moon.
Dammit! Not working is turning my brain to mush!
(That’s quite the visual, Knead.)
This is what happens when cartoonists feel they have to have one theme per week, whether it’s good for six strips or not. They run their premise into the ground.
Loss of soul is a common enough complaint in cubicle farms: “I’ve given body and soul to this corporation and what have I gotten in return?”; “I can feel this job sucking the soul out of me”, and so forth.
So Catbert takes this literally and trolls for souls. OK, that’s fair. And it was mildly funny when Wally sold his soul for a doughnut. Considering the quality of Dilbert since 1993, “mildly funny” = “surprisingly good”.
But today’s strip runs the premise so far into the ground that it comes out the other side of the Earth. “Cauterizing a head” to prevent a soul from escaping? That isn’t funny, it’s just stupid. The whole point of “buying somebody’s soul” or “stealing somebody’s soul” is to get control of it after the person dies, not to trap it in their body.
But the week isn’t over yet, so we’ll see two more strips on the same topic.
St. Peter, don’t you call me 'cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
-Merle Travis (Published by Merle’s Girls Music, Inc./Unichappel BMI)
Actually, I’ve always been a little squicked by that sort of thing too. Not sure if I believe the idea of an immortal soul, but the concept of having it (and eternal awareness) confined in a spot or a dead body on Earth has always been something that REALLY bugged me. Ever since I read the end of ‘The Raven.’
It may just be the price of indulging an overactive imagination though. I try not to think about such things, but that doesn’t always work.
So count that as you will.
I mean, it’s not like he can actually do something to Asok so that not even death will release him, but will instead turn him into an undead abomination that will continue to labor for the company.
Not that he wouldn’t if he could…
Wait’ll you see the cat!
Catbert and Garfield should have an unfunnying contest.
The concept of the soul being confined anywhere is nonsensical, as the soul by
definition transcends all time and space (and the words we attempt to use to define
it too).
By whose definition? There are thousands of current religions, maybe millions overall in history. There are thousands or millions of “official” definitions of the “soul” and in reality each individual believer probably has a distinct notion of what a “soul” is whether that’s the “official” belief or not.
Whatever your belief is extends to nobody and nothing outside your own body. There’s no possible statement of what a “soul” must be or how it must behave.
In any case… yeah, Adams should have stopped with Wally and the doughnut (among other reasons because the punchline fits the established Wally character). This one was just:* “Huh?”*
“Way too high” does not quite describe it.