Ugh, after repeating the premise three times, Cayla finally dishes the dirt. But I’m going to do the unthinkable and defend poor Les here. I mean think about all the Lisaversaries the guy has to observe every year: birthday, deathday, Mother’s Day, wedding anniversary, Cancer Symptom Discovery Day, Diagnosis Day, Correct Diagnosis Day, New Year’s Eve, I mean come on. The guy is in the business of re-living his wife’s tragic death (and teaching or something), he can’t be expected to remember the anniversary of the day when he conned one of the few non-obese single women in town to agree to marry him in an ultra-cheapo front yard wedding (catered by Montoni’s, no less) even though it was clearly obvious that he was still totally obsessed with his long-dead wife, can he? Life is, after all, about priorities. And I’m sure he’ll make a whole huge thing out of it when she dies so ease up, Cayla, your time is gonna come.
Hey, look. Les finally got Cayla that dishwasher she asked for. Zing. Funny how he brought Summer back and updated her character’s status with a quick “don’t ask” just so he could have her set up Cayla’s woefully bogus anniversary story. If she was a real person you’d start to wonder who she pissed off up there at Batom Inc. HQ, you know? Not that I’m suggesting that we delve into Summer’s character, no, no. By no means, no. There’s no need for that, trust me. Keep her in the background and get her the hell out of here as soon as possible, please.
Anyhow, look at Les and Cayla’s tiny bed. What the hell is that? That Les throws nickles around like they’re manhole covers, I’ll tell you what. What a cheapskate.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Les’ face is not the face of someone who has forgotten an anniversary. It’s the face of someone who has turned around and is now looking at Jason Vorhees, and Jason is raising his machete.
Wait, wait…it could be the face of someone who has forgotten a Lisa-related anniversary. I stand in line to be corrected.
I suppose you could have made plans to do something together, ensuring that he wouldn’t forget…nah, that would be crazy.
No, I mean it. It’s not like they’d do anything other than go to their favorite rusty table outside of Montoni’s anyway, so why bother?
I was raised Catholic, and live in the Midwest, so I’m very familiar with Passive Aggressiveness. But as I grow older, I am learning that if you just SAY things instead of letting them smolder, the results are better. So, if it’s your anniversary, just say it. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!
You can practically hear the cheap canned laughter in the background. A staggeringly unimaginative premise, delivered in the least interesting way possible, guest starring two characters who are there for no discernible reason. He’s done it again, it’s like the comic strip version of throwing a perfect game.
This is the sort of stunt Elly Patterson would pull on John. It isn’t especially nice to look at in Milborough and it’s bad form here too.
Paul Jones: Oh my GOD you’re 100% correct. Must erase mental image now.
Something hit me. Cayla really is a character without anything to her beyond the fact that she’s a mother, a teacher of some unknown subject and the wife of Les Moore. Earlier I was typing up three ideas in under ten minutes we could see in FW where a character works hard and succeeds as a result of their hard work and I wanted to put in one for her.
Only I couldn’t. I honestly tried but no matter how much I tried I could not come up with a single idea.
That’s when it hit me. There’s basically nothing more to Cayla beyond mother, teacher and wife. We have no idea what kind of a parent she is, what she teaches, what her hobbies are, what attracted her to Les -there has to be something in Batiuk’s view at least-, or anything beyond the three basic descriptions. Mother, teacher, wife. Okay, sure she supports Les in his Lisa-related projects and sometimes seems to throw in a teasing comment, but really those don’t give any kind of firm view of who Cayla is.
Gyre, Cayla is a school secretary. So that’s one less bit of character to her–there’s no subject she teaches that she has a life-long passion for.
Another minor correction: I think the wedding was catered by some barbeque grill caterer. It looked like TB’s shoutout to a local firm but Google told me nothing at the time. Another unsolved mystery.
By the way, Luann has been in college for a month or two now, and has avoided it assiduously. But it has at least covered at least 2 weeks of classes and dorm life in that time… which is 2 weeks more than we ever saw of ‘future stars’ Summer and Keisha.
I find it so weird that Summer is having this conversation with Cayla. I’m not sure why it’s so important to her that she would ask her about it, and I’m not sure why she’s talking to Cayla about it instead of her father, since that would make more sense. If Batiuk wanted Cayla to give that punchline, he could have had the more natural exchange take place between Cayla and her own daughter, seeing as how Cayla’s perspective on this matter is something Keisha might take marginal interest in.
Batiuk really spends no time at all in setting up his strips logically. He has a joke and he just uses whoever’s available no matter how little sense it makes.
And looking at what he’s decided to focus on in this week, the first time Summer and Keisha have been consistently shown in over a year, shows he’s not very good at coming up with jokes either.
Plus, I like the photo-album borders around the last panel. That’s certainly a moment that both Les and Cayla would want to commemorate.
“So what happened when dad forgot your anniversary?”
“First I was passive all day, but then as we were going to bed–BAM–I hit him with the aggressive!”
Things are certainly bad enough without those stealth bombers circling the bedroom!
This isn’t the first time Cayla has shown passive-aggressiveness. Remember a couple of years ago, when she tackled Les during the touch football game?
But we should take in easy on TB today. He’s probably upset the Nobel Committee didn’t give him the award for Literature. Instead it gave the Prize to that hack Patrick Modiano!
Well done Cayla, you are definitely not getting that stolen piano now.
—Les’ face is not the face of someone who has forgotten an anniversary. It’s the face of someone who has turned around and is now looking at Jason Vorhees, and Jason is raising his machete.—–
BC, if you could do a mock up of Jason killing the entire cast of Funkywinkerbean…you will officially be my hero!
I take back all the times I defended Cayla. She deserves Les.
The best way to tell your husband he forgot your anniversary is when you hand him his anniversary gift and look expectantly for yours in return.
Billytheskink great Flintstones reference
Bad Wolf, I honestly had no idea. We so rarely see the people employed as teachers actually teaching anything that I just assumed she was a teacher too. That is how little there is to her. The audience has no idea what she actually does for a living. Remember I’ve erroneously called Cayla a teacher in the past and nobody’s noticed, which means that she’s so bland that most people have never seen any hints of what she does.
Think about it. Have we ever seen her complain that parents calling the school seem most interested in complaining that their children are failing history class but never want to actually sit down with the teachers to discuss the problem? Or has she ever complained that her predecessor deliberately left the system so convoluted that it meant that she could never be fired?
I’ve never seen Cayla do anything other than support Les. I’ve never seen her do anything outside of Les, except complain in Montoni’s that Les was gone. The only thing I’ve ever seen of her personal history was something about receiving a bad grade on a paper, and that was only so Les offer some moronic “wisdom.”
Cayla is no longer a separate human being. She’s just another Les worshiper.
I think Les’s shocked expression is that he now realizes that the student is now the master.
Here’s the thing with Cayla. She exists not merely to provide Les with a new love interest, creating her character was all about the big “inter-racial dating” prestige arc he used her for. The problem, though, is that once he put the two of them together there was no way in hell he’d break them up, as that sort of subject matter would just be too “controversial” for the ever-gutless TB. Pus she was already “Lisa approved” too, unlike that trollop Susan Smith. So he was stuck with her, which was an immediate problem because he always had huge issues with drawing her consistently. Thus the slow metamophosis into Cayla Tyler Moore.
Here is what is known about Cayla. Her maiden name is Williams, she comes from a family of jocks and she’s great at softball. She’s a WHS admin, she has a daughter, she makes a mean pitcher of lemonade. And she has incredibly low standards re: men.