I generally only bring up the the modern funnies pages here on EDILW in order to either shake my head sadly at the sad state of the newspaper comic strip in the 21st century, or to make fun of a particularly terrible strip that caught my eye. Therefore, I feel compelled to point out this particular Pearls Before Swine Sunday strip which I found—honest-to-God, no lie, no sarcasm or snark—to actually be pretty funny. I think I even said "Heh" out loud when I got to the seventh panel.
It goes on for two more panels after that, and I don't really get those panels (I'm not a regular reader; is the human supposed to be the cartoonist?), but wow, that seventh panel, and the way it makes you notice the effort that went in to building the joke—it's a kind of clever, show-your-work sort of strip, made funnier by how hard Pastis worked to get there.
So anyway, despite my usual cynicism for the funnies pages, I guess there really are occasionally funny funnies to be found.
Pearls Before Swine is the only comic I ever find amusing on a regular basis, especially for these laborious "so-bad-it's-not" puns.
ReplyDeleteYeah the human is supposed to be Pastis. He often does these extended set-up puns for the Sunday strips. Which Rat is always surprised and angered by...
ReplyDeleteThis would be a much more clever strip if it weren't something like the fifteenth time he's done a strip with exactly the same formula. I believe the first time he did it was "One small Steph for Dan, one giant leaf for Dan's sign". It always ends with Rat beating up Stephan Pastis.
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