How to Tell If Someone Is Dangerously Crazy

This comic has what is possibly the best first panel of any comic I ever wrote.

A few weeks after this comic ran, a nationally syndicated comic did a strip based on the same idea. A few readers pointed it out, but I chose not to make a big deal out of it. I’ve been in the “trying desperately to think of something funny to say” business long enough to know that this stuff happens.

Right now, all around the world, there are thousands of comedians, writers, and cartoonists trying their hardest to come up with an original funny idea. It’s inevitable that two people will get a similar idea around the same time occasionally. Plagiarism is, of course, completely unacceptable, but the syndicated cartoonist in this case does original work, and their execution of the idea was different enough that I was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I may seem overly trusting to you, but I’ve been on the opposite side of this problem more than once. A couple of times when I was a comedian, I had people (one of whom I had never heard of, and another whose writing I had ZERO respect for) accuse me of stealing from them. I also once did a comic about the fact that my middle name is Oscar, and I ended up doing a joke that was very similar to a preexisting comic from the excellent webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship.

Heck, just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on this very website where I discussed my attitude toward Millennials, and a couple of days later, after I’d written it but before it posted, the author John Scalzi wrote a very similar opinion on his blog.

These things happen. You just have to make sure they aren’t happening deliberately.

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How to Put Up with Some Idiot Telling You a Story He Clearly Just Made Up

I wrote the “his mistress fell on him” joke for a private gig, back when I was a comedian.

This guy hired me to do twenty minutes at his wife’s 50th birthday party, then, after everything was set, he requested that instead of my normal act I pretend to be a private investigator, there digging for dirt on his wife and her friends. It seemed particularly important to him that I go on and on about what awful, nefarious people they all were. He repeatedly told me to “really let them have it.”

I told him repeatedly that it was a bad idea, that it was not what I agreed to when I took the job, and that it would not work, but he was insistent. I ended up doing what I always did in those situations (it came up more than once). I wrote a quick, funny intro making a glancing attempt to fit the client’s wishes, then transitioned into my usual act. The theory was that if I was a comedian, and if I made the audience laugh, the client wouldn’t be able to justify not paying me.

So, I went up, pretended to be a detective for a couple of minutes, (because that’s how detectives do it, they crash parties and address the whole group at once without asking any questions) then admitted that I was a comedian, and did my usual act. The dialog in the second panel is adapted from the only detective joke I came up with that I liked.

Audience enjoyed it. The client paid me, reluctantly. But, I’m delighted to report that his money spent the same despite his lack of enthusiasm.

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How to Totally Change the Appearance of a Major Character in a Comic Strip

By this point, I had lived in Florida for a couple of years. I went back to Seattle to visit. I had come to realize that I needed more Rick poses for the comic. He agreed to pose for more photographs (I drew the images from photographs), but I was shocked to discover that he had completely changed his look.

Of course, by this time the comic had been running Seattle Weekly for a couple of years. I don’t know that the comic was a factor in his decision to change his appearance, but I like to think it was.

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How to Decide Which Super Power You Would Want

This comic is partially adapted from an idea I had a long time ago: a pitch for a sitcom called “Nerthus and Ned.” It was a sort of a modern twist on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.

Ned was a normal, modern guy who discovers that he’s reincarnated, and that in a former life, during the bronze age, he was drowned in a peat bog as a sacrificed to the goddess Nerthus. Nerthus, a beautiful woman with a German accent, who wears a sexy dress made of dirty burlap, comes to claim him, and ends up living with him in his apartment. She uses her magical powers to change every aspect of his life.

She has two powers: she can read his mind, and cause him excruciating pain.

I never pitched it to any networks, though it might have been a good fit for Fox.

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How to Turn an Enemy Into a Friend

My favorite line in the comic is “Mint juleps.”

At one time, Ric was married to a woman who liked the idea of living on an old-fashioned farm. I mean no offense to her. She was, and is, a great person. She once helped me get a job when I badly needed one. In the end, she simply wasn’t able to withstand the incredible pressures of life with Ric.

Anyway, she watched a show called Frontier House, where modern families tried to live as people in Montana did in the 1880s. I’ve always been interested in how, thanks to distance and cultural differences, time is strangely non-uniform. For instance: in my home town, the Great Depression seems to have lasted well into the ’50s. So, Ric and I would joke about how funny it would be for Ric to ruin Frontier House by showing up claiming to be one of the participants’ visiting cousin, the white suit-wearing southern dandy who refuses to help with chores and sits on the porch all day demanding mint juleps.

Once they got used to him, I would then show up as another cousin, the Saville Row tailor from Victorian London, who’s constantly measuring people’s inseams and offering to make them suits that cost more than their entire farm is worth.

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How to Tell a Kid How Lucky They Are

People often say that Millennials are lazy, unfocused, and entitled. As near as I can tell, the primary difference between Millennials and Generation X is that we Gen-Xers had the good taste to wear flannel and listen to Pearl Jam while our parents told us that we were lazy, unfocused, and entitled. We were also a clear improvement over the Baby Boomers, who wore bell bottoms and listened to Country Joe and the Fish while their parents told them that they were lazy, unfocused, and entitled.

Of course, the Baby Boomers’ parents were the Greatest Generation, many of whom spent their twenties fighting Nazis. But I’m pretty sure that many of those Nazis told them that they were lazy, unfocused, and entitled.

(NOTE: I write these commentaries several days in advance. In the time between when I wrote this and when it published, John Scalzi published some similar sentiments about millennials on his blog. This is a complete coincidence, and we don't say the exact same things, but I thought the similarity was striking enough to mention.)

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How to Live with a Disturbing Memory

Yeah, about panel 1: the idea is that in order to be a purebred female, both of the cat’s genetic parents would have to be female. I’m not sure the joke landed well.

The second, third, and forth panels are, sadly, based on a true story. A large, hirsute, and perpetually sweaty coworker announced that he had adopted a puppy. He asked a big group of his work acquaintances, myself included, if we wanted to see a picture. We said yes, because, puppy. He pulled out his phone and showed us a picture that is basically the second panel, only with a tiny puppy instead of a full grown cat.

It was a deeply uncomfortable situation for everyone but him. He seemed perfectly comfortable.

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How to Explain That You Are, in Fact, Not Cold

My thermostat runs hot. Ever since I was a kid, hot temperatures and bright light have been a real problem for me. As such, strangers might be surprised that I voluntarily moved first to Florida, then to Arizona. But anyone who knows me well, and has experience with the quality of my decision-making prowess, is not very surprised at all.

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How to Appreciate a New Album

As I remember, I considered calling the album “Tromb-osis.”

There’s a series of documentaries on Netflix called Too Young to Die. One of the episodes is about Falco, the artist who recorded Rock Me Amadeus. At one point, they interview some Austrian dude who was a good friend of Falco’s. He says that if you ask anyone who really knows, Falco was right up there with Grand Master Flash as one of the fathers of hip hop.

I heard that, and I thought, “No, Austrian dude who probably tells everyone that he was good friends with Falco, if YOU ask anyone they’ll tell you that. If I, or anybody who wasn’t a personal friend of Falco, goes around asking if Falco was one of the fathers of hip hop, I suspect we’ll get a very different answer.”

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How to End a One-Sided Conversation

All of my comics bashing the trombone are based (pretty loosely) on actual conversations I’ve had with a real friend.

That friend is Rick.

He used to be a professional jazz trombonist, and is still quite good. It’s also true that he has no respect for the valve trombone.

After all the grief I’d given him about every other aspect of his life, I thought picking on him over the trombone was a step too far. In retrospect, giving the trombones to mullet boss was still a pretty grave insult.

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