Girls and Sports: Marshall, you're not sensitive enough for me.

This comic is hilarious because it reinforces gender stereotypes and titillates with intimations of hot cartoon lesbian sex.*

*Shameless search engine whoring.

Family Circus: Mommy, my socks don't agree with each other!

This cartoon is hilarious because Dolly doesn't speak like a normal human being.

Marmaduke: Remember, this one is for ME.

This cartoon is hilarious because Marmaduke is living in Pleasantville?

Family Circus: I have $7.35 in my bank, Mommy. Do you think I should get a financial advisor?

This cartoon is hilarious because the value of money is relative.

Frank and Ernest and Brewster Rockit: Fun--and not so much fun--with puns.

All puns are bad. Take the above installment of the always awful Frank and Ernest, for example.

But some puns are so bad they're good. Stephen Pastis is the master, but Tim Rickard pulls of some pretty decent punnery, too.

The difference between bad puns and so-bad-they're-good puns lies mostly in the set-up. The better the set-up, the funnier the pun. The set-up in that Frank and Ernest is just lazy, and so the pun comes off as lazy, too. The set-up in Brewster Rockit, meanwhile, is so absurd and unexpected that the pun is sort of funny. Likewise, the set-up in the linked Pearls Before Swine is so ornate that the pun is sort of funny. In each case, it's not really the pun that produces the humor, but all the obvious and self-conscious effort the author put into the set-up to make the pun work.

On its own, a pun is a just a pun, after all. And everybody knows puns suck. The trick to making them funny is taking them seriously.

Pickles: Oh...I forgot to tell you. I accidentally opened the box from the bottom.

Ever since I came to this realization, Pickles has genuinely depressed the fuck out of me.

Born Loser: Can anyone tell me what the word "rotunda" means?

This comic is hilarious because Wilberforce has poor vocabulary.

Family Circus: The best thig about how this tastes is its flavor.

This cartoon is hilarious because Dolly has poor vocabulary.

Pluggers: You're a plugger if you get your daily water requirement with your daily meds.

This cartoon is hilarious because pluggers are disease-ridden drug addicts.

Alternatively, this cartoon is hilarious because without government-funded healthcare, most pluggers would be dead. And yet they oppose government-funded healthcare for others.

Brewster Rockit: The rise of the appliances!

While not quite as thematically challenging, Brewster Rockit is far funnier than Battlestar Galactica ever was.