Come to Funky Winkerbean for the mesmerizingly inane plot, stay for the intense first-person envelope stuffing action! And in such detail! We almost get to see what the ingredients of Montoni’s famous salad dressing are. Alas, all we will know is that it contains ‘< of 10 em WWWW’.
Cute pun too. Nice to see that the salad dressing gift was really a prop in service of a sentiment. Provided Donna likes salad dressing, this is a perfectly adequate anniversary present for an older couple living off of the income of a single part time job at a comics shack. Certainly better than an IOU for a trip to China that is quickly forgotten.
‘Salad Days’ is such a weird idiom though. We’ve become so removed from the concrete meaning of the metaphor, that usage of the phrase keeps sliding further and further away from it’s genesis in Shakespeare. Nowadays it generally means a worry-free and pleasant time of life. Either youth, or retirement. But that’s only after evolving more times than a Pokémon.
Of course, I fell down the internet hole again on this one. It’s my specialty.
‘Salad days’ comes from a line in Shakespeare’s 1606 play, Antony and Cleopatra. But like a lot of popular Shakespearian idioms, the turn of phrase didn’t get pulled out as a stock phrase until the mid 19th century. Initially salad days was a somewhat negative expression, meaning a time of ignorant indiscretion in youth. You’re green, and cold, and will soon wilt, and so do stupid things. Like get a Star Wars tattoo or seduce Julius Caesar.
Which brings us to the origin of the phrase in the play. In Act 1 Scene V of Antony and Cleopatra, Cleo is gushing about Marc Antony, her hunky Roman boyfriend, and preparing to send dozens of messengers after him like the first century equivalent of blowing up his cell phone with texts. She asks one of her servants if she ever loved her old, now dead, Italian dressing, Julius Caesar so much.
CLEOPATRA Did I, Charmian, Ever love Caesar so?
CLEOPATRA Be choked with such another emphasis!
Say, the brave Antony.
CLEOPATRA By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth,
If thou with Caesar paragon again
My man of men.
CHARMIAN By your most gracious pardon,
I sing but after you.
CLEOPATRA My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.
So, you know, if Batiuk wants to go with this original allusion that’s fine. It’s nice to think that Crazy Harry and Donna will grow to disavow this time in their lives, and see themselves as stupid for ever feeling this way. And if they want to finish it all off by dying of snakebite, so much the better.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Man, there sure have been a shitload of silent strips lately. Just a few weeks ago there were four in a row and that Adeela arc (yeah, I forgot about it already too) had a bunch of them too. I guess he gets credit for the idea, as there’s no “writing” involved here, but the whole comic strip scene is a shadowy netherworld where they play by their own rules, so who really knows?
Remember when he took away Crazy’s mailman job and stripped the character of his main defining characteristic? Another cruel vindictive story arc that served no purpose at all other than to punish Harry for being the cool kid in high school. Now he’s reduced to shilling salad dressing for some woebegone pizzeria. Quite a fall for the one-time air guitar legend.
It’s called not writing.
Shakespeare or no Shakespeare ,we need a third panel where Crazy Harry gets clobbered with that bottle for making an asp of himself.
I wish Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days would happen to these insufferable characters.
Pretty strong meat there from (sniff!) Sam Peckinpah.
The main ingredient in Montoni’s salad dressing appears to be < v 10 ~, which I think has been banned in the European Union since the mid-90s.
“Funky, you didn’t store the salad dressing next to those cases of old Starbuck Jones fan club rings, did you?”
“Yeah, so what?”
(Cut to a bald Harry and Donna sitting on a park bench as leaves fall all around them)
I forget…is salad dressing the gift for a couple’s 30th wedding anniversary or the 35th? I know it’s breadsticks for the 10th, grated cheese on the 15th, and marinara sauce on the 20th, but after that my memory’s a little fuzzy, like…oh, yeah! It’s anchovies on the 30th!
There’s gotta be something coming to accompany this condiment commemoration…doesn’t there?
Wow, CBH! That was great research. Fascinating how the expression morphed in the Victorian Era. There’s always something to learn at SOSF, even when the strip itself has inconsistencies and gaping plot holes.
I do wonder if TomBa is giving us a plot twist. It looks like Harry might be wearing a suit jacket. I wonder what lesson he wants us to get this week.
I agree. Excellent research and writing! You have brought substance to these empty strips. Even though Batty gave you nothing to work with, you still managed to come up with some interesting commentary. Bravo!
You = CBH
Thanks guys! 🙂 When you’re given this little to work with, you’ll fall down any rabbit hole you can spot.
Much love and respect CBH! Kiss kiss.
Believe me, if it were my anniversary, I’d rather have Barney Rubble & the cops crooning me with a hot Stoneway piano instead of getting a cheap bottle of heartburn.
We’ll Batty is going to ruin Crankshaft now. I sense a very special arc beginning. Crankshaft resists the urge to bully that nerd as he leaves the bus…it is the start of Crankshaft’s mental decline. The Alzheimer’s is setting in.
(Checking NYT for puff piece interview with Batty)
Yeah, Harry. Nothing says “wild, carefree days of youth” like a dull, underemployed 50-year-old wrapping an $8 anniversary gift in a rejected Carrot Top joke. That should be a bottle of cyanide, though I’m not sure which of you should drink it.
Obviously Donna, and only Donna, should drink it. If Crazy Harry drinks it, he’ll die slowly while Donna stands by helplessly and talks to Les Moore, who will then exploit Harry’s death and funeral. Plus there will be two or three weeks while we discover that Harry never tried for a post-office pension and now can’t qualify for it If they both drink it, Les will show up and bloviate at the funeral, saying he wishes he’d died with Dead Lisa. But if only Donna dies, well, she’s a woman in the Funkyverse. She’ll be lucky if Harry remembers to tell Les she died, just like the Ruminator did in “Starbuck Jones Saves the Space Superheroes.” (Which will lead to a Sideways Sunday strip with Harry as Jones and Dead Donna cradled in his arms.)
I just gave all this more thought than Batiuk would have, didn’t I?
It’s scary how plausible that all is.
Are they trying to pace a gag-a-day comic strip like a graphic novel? You can get away with completely silent pages in a graphic novel…
Oh well, Happy Anniversary to Antony and Cleo- Oh uh I mean Crazy Harry and Salad Dressing. I’ll look at the pictures on Green Pitcher’s Facebook later, if that’s okay.
Batiuk uses silent panels whenever he wants to telegraph that something is super-dramatic, and that awards committees should take notice. But 90% of the time, it’s in a filler panel that doesn’t need to exist at all. Strips like today’s shouldn’t be emphasized; they should be edited out. On top of that, this one needlessly reveals the punchline early. (Not that we all didn’t see it coming. But if the writer is going to act like this is a legit punchline, he should make the effort to deliver it properly.)
Batiuk’s use of silent panels is a great example of a writer overusing a trope, and not knowing how to use it correctly.
PLEASE KILL ME NOW
NO SUCH LUCK
The Minor Threat song “Salad Days” from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQ45Chpj-4
“Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs.”