Working Daze: Archer!

This comic is hilarious because someone is referencing Star Trek: Enterprise in a nonderogatory manner.

Drabble: This is a buffet, Ralph...

It appears that Ralph is literally eating various kinds of garbage.

This is not surprising.

Stone Soup: Twitter.

This cartoon is hilarious because birds tweet and twitter just like how on Twitter you tweet. It's a good thing Stone Soup is around or no one would have ever made this observation, except possibly for the people who invented Twitter.

Family Circus: The right is for cold, left one's for hot and the middle is for warm.

Dolly Keane is paradox. On the one hand, she may be the second coming of Machiavelli. On the other hand, she's too stupid to understand the knobs on her sink.

BC: Bad rap.

So the corpse of Johnny Hart is not a fan of the hip hop.

This is shocking.

Zits: Are these people related?

This comic is hilarious because these two people are, in fact, related.

Monty: Weird.

I'm almost always being a sarcastic asshole when I use the "This cartoon is hilarious" thing, but I really have found this series of Monty comics, in which the robot attempts to sex up the vacuum cleaner, genuinely funny. Far funnier than Sir Rodney's similar relationship with his horse.

Family Circus: Was I s'posed to like this dinner or not?

This cartoon is hilarious because Jeffy the enormous douche has returned in a new, more gluttonous form.

Farcus: It was either this or a union.

This cartoon is hilarious because it's a shockingly accurate depiction of how dairy cows actually live.

Drabble: You're a pretty kitty, aren't you! I love you so much! Let's go get some num-nums!

This comic is hilarious because Ralph is worried that his wife is fucking her pet cat.

Blondie: That's a good point, honey.

This comic is hilarious because Dagwood's faith is superficial and egocentric.

The Fusco Brothers: Let's just say that if you were Ziggy, you would not be getting a ticket.

This comic is supposed to be funny because Ziggy is a far more successful comic strip than The Fusco Brothers. But it fails on two levels:

1. The Fusco Brothers basically is Ziggy.
2. As such, of course Ziggy would be getting a ticket. That's the whole point of Ziggy.

Monty and Off the Mark: What's with all these pop-up ads for Hoover vacuums?

These comics are hilarious because both the robot and the apple have been masturbating while viewing bizarre fetish material on the Internet.

Moderately Confused: Was it the laptop, Twitter, Facebook or iPhones that killed Rockwell's America?

This cartoon is hilarious because these middle-aged people apparently believe that Rockwell's America actually existed.

Family Circus: And one more--FLU season.

Billy should not tell jokes, as doing so could just lead people to assume that he's as dumb as his siblings.

Also, his jokes suck.

Marmaduke: I can't ... I can't resist ... ready ... aim ...

This cartoon is hilarious because the man is abusing his neighbor's pet dog.

Beetle Bailey: I just got my DNA test back!

I can only assume that this comic is going to precipitate Beetle Bailey's slow transformation from a rarely humorous gag strip to a rarely dramatic soap strip.

Apartment 3-G better watch its back.

Family Circus: When I'm just getting used to how old I am, I have to learn a new number.

This cartoon is hilarious because Grandma Keane is old.

Monty: I swear I never touched her hepa filter!

This cartoon is hilarious because the robot is molesting a vacuum cleaner.

Marmaduke: He digs them up every once in a while to take inventory.

Phil isn't worried because he knows that this is just standard behavior among serial killers.

Family Circus: This is the last day I'll be five. Time sure flies when you're havin' fun.

Poor Dolly. Putting on a brave face. Pretending that she might actually age her way out of the hell that is The Family Circus. Not realizing that the narrative of the Keanes actually exists outside the bounds of time. Not realizing that she will always be five. Not realizing that she will always have abusive parents and a homicidal sibling.

At least she'll also always have PJ to kick around.

Flying McCoys: I wear a fanny pack so I don't look stupid cramming my pockets full of stuff.

This cartoon would have made more sense if it were published 15 years ago when people actually wore fanny packs.

Ziggy: You are here ... while other people are out getting things done!

No map or sign in the Ziggyverse actually contains useful information. Instead, they just berate you for being a pathetic motherfucker. It's heartwarming!

The message of this particular sign also provides further evidence for my theory that Ziggy is actually the comic strip version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, with Ziggy as a stand in for all the parasites that feed of the successes of good and moral people everywhere.

Family Circus: I'm REALLY strong.

Billy appears to be wearing eyeliner.

Apparently he's going to run one of THOSE cults.

Hagar the Horrible: Psttt...

If this comic were just about plunder, it wouldn't be very funny. But since it's about plunder, kidnapping and a lifetime's worth of rape, it is very funny indeed.

Because nothing's more hilarious than a lifetime's worth of rape.

Pluggers: Some pluggers have really jumped on the "going green" bandwagon.

It's worth pointing out--and not just because his link has been giving me a shitload of traffic--that Jaime Weinman's exactly right about Pluggers and Jay Leno trafficking in the same type of humor. Just observe how similar the joke in this cartoon is to this Leno joke from James Poniewozik's Time cover story:

Jay Leno drove to work today in an 84-year-old car. It sits in his parking space in the NBC lot, on this sweltering summer morning in Burbank, a 1925 Model T Roadster. “That’s part of my social experiment, being green,” he tells me. “It’s my theory that if you drive the same car for 80 years, you’re more environmentally friendly than buying a new car every five or six years, even if it’s a hybrid. I mean, that is the original green car. It has nothing on it. There’s no water pump, no oil pump. There’s no — it just has what you need to get from point A to point B.”

So there you go. Saving the earth isn't about sacrificing or anything. It's about ... not sacrificing. Because sacrificing's stupid. Ha ha.

(I was going to write a long post about the type of humor Pluggers traffics in, but, really, just read Jaime's post, invert Leno and Pluggers, and you'll know what I was going to write without me actually having to write it.)

Pearls Before Swine: Hey, buy me the moped. I'll drive it off a cliff.

There is an undercurrent of misanthropy that runs through pretty much the entire comics section, but nearly all comics pretend that it isn't there. If this blog has a mission, beyond killing time, it's to uncover that misanthropy. And that's basically Pearls Before Swine's mission, too. This is both what makes Pearls such a great strip and why I like it so much.

Also, a suicidal monkey! It's funny!

Family Circus: PJ wants to play with his new ball!

PJ continues to be the most tolerable, and therefore most tormented, Keane child. Jeffy should probably just put him out of his misery and murder him horribly.

Luann: Free draw! Let your imagination soar!

When Luann isn't titillating its audience with inappropriate sexual implications or annoying its audience with endless love triangles of doom, it can sometimes be a pretty decent comic strip. To be sure, this comic is nothing terribly original. But it is a sharply observed slice of high school life, which is not something you're likely to find anywhere else in the comics section.