Monty: AAAIEEE! Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren!

This is a good example of how good characters and a sufficiently ridiculous situation can make even the most arcane political humor funny.

Monty: Haven't you seen that WWII Lockheed C-60 hanging in the basement?

There are two punchlines in this comic: the image-based one in the third panel and the dialog-based one in the fourth. They each come in reaction to the set-up in the second panel, and they are each funny on their own. Putting them together, however, somehow makes them both less funny and results in a worse comic. Turning the first punchline into a cut-away with another panel after it robs it of the power it would have had as a final image, while including the image before the fourth panel makes the second punchline seem like an afterthought.

I get the sense that the cartoonist couldn't decide which punchline was better, so he decided to use both. But that's cheating. Part of working in a medium with severe space limitations is being a ruthless editor. Sometimes you have to cut good stuff so that the stuff you do use is more affecting. Not that there aren't times when cheating can pay off. This just isn't one of those cases.

And just in case anyone's wondering, personally, I would have gone with the first punchline. But I'm a big fan of image-based humor, so I'm a little biased.

Monty: That's my posterior anal casing...

Very partial list of things you can say in the comics section:

1. "Anal."

This surprises me. But I am looking forward to Funky Winkerbean's now inevitable anal rape plot.

Monty: OK! OK! I admit it! I forgot the last four digits of your model number!

I'm sorry. I know I should probably stop being so amused by this storyline. But come on! The vacuum's holding an umbrella! AN UMBRELLA! It's funny!

Monty: Oh no ... I was afraid this would happen.

If robot-on-vacuum love ever ceases to amuse, the terrorists will have finally won.

Monty: Diagram 14b

Robot-on-vacuum love is a comedy gold mine.

No, really.

Monty: No! No! Oh how she used to love sucking the futon!

I've expressed my love for this robot-on-vacuum love story before, and now it's also given us "Oh how she used to love sucking the futon," which is just one of those nonsensical phrases that's a lot of fun to repeat without context to crowds of horrified non-Monty-reading people.

Monty: I hope you saved the receipt on that.

Old jokes, well executed.

Monty: It's not working

In which Monty redeems itself.

Monty: I was dreaming I was in Australia...

This comic is hilarious because it's virtually the same as this Family Circus cartoon. Minus the physical abuse, of course.

Monty: This is like a sequel to "The Terminator," if you went back in time and had James Cameron write the screenplay when he was twelve...

Actually, it's a lot like Minority Report. Which was a pretty good movie! Why you hating on Philip K. Dick, Monty?

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.

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.

Monty: I swear I never touched her hepa filter!

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

Monty: My hard-inherited wafers, mind you!

This Monty is one of the better political comics I've seen in a while. It recalls vintage Bloom County in that it reveals the absurdity of a national political debate by personalizing it through characterization.

Monty: Hubba hubba.

The premise of this joke is nothing particularly original. It's simple, entirely predictable misdirection. Jim Meddick seems to recognize this and doesn't even really try to hide it. It's not hard to envision the strip ending on the third panel, in which case the misdirection would have been the whole joke, and I probably would have made fun of it for being lame.

But it doesn't end on the third panel. Instead, it ends with a terrifically funny punchline in the fourth panel. And so, in a fairly rare turn, I've posted about this comic not because it's terrible, but because it made me laugh out loud.

Monty: Something tells me that was a fruit-globule person...

This installment of Monty kind of shocks me. I thought everyone was a fruit-globule person.

Monty: Suddenly this episode of Battlestar Galactica looks like an old "Laurel and Hardy" movie...

Battlestar Galactica easily falls under the Vonnegut Axiom, but this whole comic just sort of feels like an excuse to work the reference in.

Monty: Mr. Crumpet, I command you...Eviscerate! Eviscerate!

Things that are funny about this cartoon, in order from least funny to most funny:

1. That the dog is scared of the cat.
2. That the dog is a shih tzu named Mr. Crumpet.
3. That the dog's bow is identical to Master Sedgwick's bow tie.
4. Eviscerate! Eviscerate!
5. Disembowel! Disembowel!
6. That the dog drinks kiwi-lemonade.
7. That the dog drank too much kiwi-lemonade.
8. That the dog is actually peeing in the third panel.

Brewster Rockit and Monty: I think your machine is malfunctioning.

Both of these comics rely on fairly subtle, mostly image-based set-ups, and therefore actually require the reader to pay attention in order to completely get the jokes. This is an unfortunately rare occurrence in the comics section.

On another note, I've been meaning to write about Monty for a while now, but it's such an efficient, low-key sort of comic that it's often hard to find anything particularly interesting to say about it. But it's one of the better comic strips around, and you should probably read it.