Don’t know if the book signing‘s been canceled or if it just hasn’t taken place yet. Meanwhile Harry and Becky view the wares on display, including “a GPS system for your trombone section.” Because if you’ve seen Animal House, you remember that trombonists have a terrible sense of direction.
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Happy Valentine’s Day from SoSF! |
Son of Stuck Funky 
I guess he IS referencing “Animal House” with that “joke”. Oh that Batom: always abreast of today’s newest fads and popular culture trends. Too bad there’s not a GPS system for comic strip author’s attention spans, am I right?
If anyone else did this, I would just consider it another installment in the vast annals of “poke fun at x group of instrumentalists/vocalists/whatever” jokes. (My personal favorite: Q: How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Wow, it’s like, dark in here?) This being Batiuk, however, I’m just wondering if a trombone player made a cutting remark to him once during his junior year of high school, and he’s been holding a grudge ever since.
And on Valentine’s Day, we spend it -not- with the Wise Author and his new bride, -not- with any of the couples joined in any sort of bond, romantic or otherwise…but with a geezer who may or may not have tragic hearing loss and a teacher who hates her job, hates her students, avoids her spouse, might have killed her mother, but always…ALWAYS finds time to hang out with the geezer.
Both showing more warmth, pleasure, and intimacy with each other than they ever, EVER do with their ostensible spouses.
There’s a message here. Emotional affairs? They’re a-okay as long as you don’t actually have sex!
….sure, Tom. Sure.
I think BatDork would have found Animal House (one of my all time favorites) offensive. Was probably just making a generalized “trombonists are STOOOOPID” joke. Like, what’s a true optimist? A trombonist with a pager.
Or, what do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer. That sort of thing. I know thousands of these. And I’ll be here all week! Try the veal!
But before I go, what the fug kind GPS is he holding there?? One made in East Germany in 1979?? Does it have vacuum tubes in it?? Christ, I know BatHump isn’t exactly up on this Evil Technology, but who doesn’t know they make GPS devices a bit smaller than that these days? How about a GPS for Bats to find a clue?
If you’ll allow me to improve this–
You know what’s really depressing? I think my version is funnier, and I did it in only a couple of hours, and I’d had a lot of beers before I even started. That’s pretty damned depressing.
Q: What does a drummer get on an IQ test?
A: Drool.
Q: What do you call a drummer who just broke up with his girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
And to think after this ridiculous, not-even-funny joke, sometime in the next month TB’s going to claim, at least through whatever he’s writing about, that his comic is SRS BSNS AND YOU NEED TO TAKE IT SRSLY.
Also, it’s made of beaded glass and shaped like a cucumber. Otherwise, there’s not much reason for Becky to be that fascinated by a trombone GPS whatchamacallit.
“Mama, I want to be a drummer when I grow up!”
“But Johnny, you can’t do both!”
What phrase do you never hear in conversation?
“That’s the banjo-player’s Porsche.”
A drummer, sick of all the drummer jokes, decides to change his instrument. So he goes to the music store to try and decide which instrument he’d like to take up. After browsing awhile, the drummer asks the store owner, “How much for that big silver accordion in the corner?”
The store owner looks over in the corner, looks back at the drummer and says, “You’re a drummer, aren’t you?”
The drummer, surprised, asks, “How did you know?”
The store owner says, “That ‘big silver accordion’ is a radiator.”
What’s the difference between a dead clarinet player laying in the middle of the road, and a dead rabbit laying in the middle of the road?
The rabbit may have been on his way to a gig.
Those who can’t drum, drum major!
Who the hell is the girl/teenage boy/whatever in the last panel? I might start calling Becky One-Armed Lisa.
In case you’re not sure, the panel with no background detail contains the punchline. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
So, to keep track of the percussion section do you need to buy a TomTom?
And just to give the trombones and drummers a rest…
Q: How do you get two piccolo players to play in tune?
A: Shoot one.
Q: How many sopranos does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One to hold the bulb and the rest of the world to revolve around her.
Q: What’s the difference between a soprano and the Taliban?
A: You can negotiate with the Taliban.
These are all well-worn jokes to say the least, yet they’re still funnier than anything Baituk has done in recent memory.
Q: What is the difference between a guitar player and mutal fund?
A: Eventually the mutaul fund will mature and earn money.
Q: How do you get rid of the gutair player standing at your front door?
A: Pay for the Pizza.
“A terrible thing just happened to me – when I parked my car I left my Banjo on the back seat and car doors unlocked. When I got back there were four more banjos.”
A man washes ashore shipwecked on a tropical island – all the time he is there there is the constant beat of drums. He asks why the drums are always going and is told -” be thankful the drums are playing. When they stop it means something terrible is about to happen”
Then one afternoon the drums stop – natives pour out of their homes and race for the canoes in a frantic effort to flee the island.
“Wait.” the man “why is everybody running? What happens now?”
“Bass solo” a passing native says.
I finally figured it out. His real name is Harry Sandusky. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that he’s still hanging around the high school.
Also, I didn’t realize drummers were held in such low esteem. Then again, I was the bassist in my (admittedly awful) band.
@John: Were you actually asking for Moore Les?
I liked Harry better when he was Martinet who never took off his uniform.
by itself, I like today’s strip. It reminds of when this strip was a lot more lighthearted and mildly humorous before the days of misery porn.
Yes, but can that GPS locate the whereabouts of one Daniel Simpson Day?
@Jimmy: Think about it- Every time we’ve seen Les and Cayla alone together recently, she’s insulted or injured him.
So help me, watching Les get what’s coming to him is like being drenched in rich, delicious chocolate.
I for one am glad to no longer be subjected Less & Crayola.
By Batyuck spreading out his loathsome views on other characters it shows that he is genuinely a malcontent who could turn a cute YouTube kitten video into something sardonic and misery filled.
Ya I’m talking about you Tom!
(thanks for checking in BTW)
Oh…KSU women basketball suck and Cindy is still embedded
@ProfessorFate–Reminds me of one of my dad’s favorite jokes:
Two explorers head deep into the jungle wilds. As they hack their way through the undergrowth, they hear the insistent beat of tribal drums. As the sound grows louder, one explorer turns to the other and says, “I don’t like the sound of those drums.”
From beyond the bushes a voice calls back, “He’s not our regular drummer!”
Harry’s smiling symmetrically again. This is just weird. Is it possible that Batominc is responding to our relentless criticism of the FW lopsided smirk? I’m not so sure this is a win. Now the smiles are banal, like a 1970s happy face.
I just bought a new GPS to help me find the punchline in each morning’s Funky Winkerbean strip, but the damn thing can’t (or won’t) acquire satellite reception.
Don’t look now, by Dean is back at Dean’ Comic Booth and did a pretty good mash-up on Sunday’s strip.
Mash
I don’t know if this has been said, but I have to say it — Is this old guy the same faux-military band director with his hat pulled down? Maybe I’m a babbling lunatic, but I believe when you grow older, you become pretty much an older version of what you’ve always been. The old gung-ho band director would NOT have grown into kindly, sappy, punning old grandfatherly dope. So basically, I don’t buy this character at all.
What in hell is the explanation for this transformation, in which this guy has become a completely different person? Has BatHole drawn a retcon flashback showing Dinkle taking off his hat after school, revealing this really sweet, gentle, soft-spoken young guy underneath, just playing a “character” for his students? (Oh Christ, I may have just given Tommeh an idea.)
No, I call TOTAL “bullshit” on this current Dinkle character. The real Old Dinkle would be a grouchy old SOB who would gripe constantly about how today’s bands, and all students in general, “lack discipline.” He’d sit on his porch and yell at passing teenagers to get a haircut. No damn way that quasi-Third-World-dictator becomes Captain Kangaroo in his old age.
I think last May, he was retconned into being scared by Roberta, which someone commented “you had to castrate Dinkle to make Roberta the villain”.
I can’t think of which is honestly worse–Act II or Act III. With Act II, there was semblance to Act I…
Wait, why hasn’t anyone else noticed how frickin’ huge those “GPS systems” are?! My mom’s had ones the size of her wallet that can cover the darn country, why would you need one the size of a football to direct band players on a single football field?
While Act II was far more enraging and ridiculous, Act III is just a meandering, ponderous, dismal mess full of doughy old feebs and young blithering morons, all of them doing nothing and saying nothing while going nowhere very, very slowly.
Senor: I know I’ve made comments similar to that re: Dinkle. In his zeal to re-make Dinkle as yet another wryly smirking old coot, he forgot who the character was in the first place. Beanie is correct as well, he was never this irritatingly affable grinning idiot before and if it isn’t explicitly spelled out for the readers whenever he appears you might not even realize it’s supposed to be him.
Plus, whatever happened to his “tragic hearing loss”, milked for such angst and melodrama just a few years ago?
Nothing says Valentine’s Day like following Harry Dinkle to a Marching Band Convention with his wife & “protege,” who would have brought her husband along but the hotel room only had one bed (wink wink), leaving him to have all of his meals alone at Moni—WAIT! Alone?! My god, where are the children? With Becky off on her “convention weekend” and step-dad drowning his despair in greasy pizza as he re-bags and boards last week’s new releases, the kids are at home staying warm by burning extra copies of SPAWN #1 that were over-ordered back in ’92.