Prickly City: I'd stop saying, "So this is where they filmed it!" unless you want a Buzz Aldrin knuckle sandwich, Winslow!!!

This comic is hilarious because liberals are moon-landing-denying conspiracy theorists who hate astronauts and America.

Luann: ...

This comic is hilarious because Toni and Brad are going to do the sex. Hijinks will ensue.

Family Circus: If the cavemen cooked a dinosaur they'd have leftovers for a year.

Just another wise aphorism from future cult leader Billy Keane.

Cleats: First sign of a bubble and I'm outta here!

This comic is hilarious because it's about farting.

9 Chickweed Lane: Allow me, sister...

This comic is hilarious because Thorax has a tremendous wang.

Herb & Jamaal: Cause busy souls have no time to be busybodies.

But they apparently do have time to be snide, judgmental assholes.

Blondie: Memoirs? You're five years old.

I did not know Elmo was five years old and would never have guessed as much. This is because he is the least realistic five year old ever.

Sally Forth: We have a team to slaughter.

This comic is hilarious because Ted is attempting to alleviate his sexual frustration through his daughter's softball team, which sounds quite a bit worse than it actually is, but no more pathetic.

In the next exciting installment of Sally Forth: It doesn't work.

Pearls Before Swine and Farcus: The Great Chicken Rebellion

Animal uprisings are very popular in the comics section today. And why shouldn't they be? Animal uprisings are hilarious! Just ask George Orwell.

But the real raison d'etre of this post is to point out that single-panel cartoons face some pretty serious disadvantages as compared to multi-panel comic strips. Farcus and Pearls Before Swine are each employing the same gag here, but Pearls is funnier. Why? Because it has better defined characters and more space to lay out the joke.

Single-panel cartoons live and die by the absurd situations they illustrate. There's rarely enough space for them to do anything else. It doesn't have the advantage of being able to say funny things about those absurd situations or to have those absurd situations affect their characters. So for a single-panel cartoon to work, the situation has to be really absurd and inherently funny. It's tough to come up with a situation like that every day. And the result is that they tend to be pretty hit or miss.

It's similar to the difference between a sitcom and sketch comedy show. A show like The Office or Party Down can go a whole season without a bad episode, as each one did last year. But even the best sketch comedy shows are going to contain a lot of bad sketches. Even when everyone thinks it was better (which varies from person to person and depends almost entirely upon what era an individual grew up watching), the bad sketches on Saturday Night Live outweighed the good. The same is true of Monty Python and The State and The Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show with Bob and David. It's just really hard to come up with so many funny ideas. A lot of them are bound to fall flat.

Flying McCoys: Okay, Buddy, back on the sidewalk.

This cartoon is hilarious because driving a fuel-efficient car is a clear indication that you have a small penis and get beat up by girls.