How to Help someone see the Bright side

Ric and I had a friend who suffered an unfortunately timed case of hemorrhoids. There’s no good time for hemorrhoids, but his chose an especially bad time because his hemorrhoids came right as another friend of ours was on a hard-core positive-thinking kick, which led him to proclaim that the guy with the hemorrhoids was looking at things “all wrong,” and that the hemorrhoids could turn out to be “a marvelous opportunity.”

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How to Help Someone Recognize Their Faults

I did this comic as a gift for Ric, believe it or not. His favorite comic strip of all time is Peanuts (early Peanuts when it still had an edge). There was a run of comics in the ’60s where Lucy shows Charlie Brown a slide show of all of his faults. I did the same thing to Ric in an effort to make him happy and as a tribute to Charles Schulz.

Also, I was short of ideas.

Note from Missy: How intriguing that I’m the second-tallest bar in the graph. And yet, that level of esteem for him never stopped real-life Rick from calling me “Skippy.”

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How to Maintain an Adversarial Relationship

You don’t hear much about the self-destruct mechanism anymore. I’d think that, when designing a spaceship, the self-destruct system would be on the wish list but would be one of the first things to fall away when budget cuts kick in.

 “Look, none of us knew that the cost of titanium was going to go up like it has, but a spaceship needs an outer skin. There’s no getting around it. You’re either going to have to increase the budget by a couple billion or—and I know you won’t like this—you’ll have to save the self-destruct mechanism for phase two.”

Reading back over that, it occurred to me that I might be watching too much HGTV.

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How to Spot the Bad Guy

There are certain actors that whenever they show up, I’m pretty sure they’re the villain. James Cromwell is one of them. Even when he’s not the primary antagonist, he’s still usually up to something. It even holds true in Star Trek: First Contact, where he plays the inventor of warp drive technology. Sure, he helps the crew of the Enterprise and makes first contact with the Vulcans, but if you know the original series well, then you know he’s just biding his time until he can sneak off to an asteroid and have a romantic relationship with an energy cloud.

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How to React to a Crackpot Theory

I love . . . LOVE the premise of this comic (and it’s not often that I say that) but I wish I had written it more carefully. I was trying to communicate the idea that Mullet Boss had taken one of humanity’s greatest achievements and cheapened it by turning it into a smutty joke. Instead, looking at it now, I fear that it reads a bit homophobic, which was not my intention, and kinda ruins the comic for me.

Still, I love the premise . . . because you know at least two of those guys totally had sex on the moon. The idea that the first sex on the moon was gay sex is sort of inspiring.

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How to Pronounce Oregon

Back when I was a comedian, there was a one-nighter at a bar in Coos Bay, Oregon. The seating arrangement was what’s sometimes called “in the round,” which means the audience has you surrounded. That’s a good thing when it’s a good audience. The fact that I came up with the mnemonic device in the third panel at one of my performances there should tell you something.

Washington and Oregon have a weird relationship, like twin siblings that resent each other and pick at each other, but will be the first to defend each other if someone else attacks them.

Oregon is a beautiful state, full of wonderful people, and nobody’s enjoying watching them learn to pump their own gas more than I am.

Note from Missy: I remain delighted with the panel 2 joke about the schwa. ə!

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How to Plan a Party

I worked in a place where almost everybody brought their lunch from home and ate it in the breakroom. One time, we had a potluck. I observed that the only thing that made the potluck different from a normal day was that we were sharing our food. That didn’t add to the festive mood.

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How to Streamline the Organization

I have learned from bitter experience that asking people to do things because if they don’t, you will get in trouble does not motivate them.

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How to hear All About That Show That Was on Last Night

People don’t want to hear about the funny thing that happened in the bathroom. If you say, “The funniest thing just happened in the bathroom,” you can see how conflicted it makes them.

Alas, I can’t think of any funny bathroom stories at the moment. I suspect you’re more relieved than disappointed.

Note from Missy: So, Scott, you wouldn’t like me telling your readers about how one of our cats races to the bathroom with you every morning? And how she bites you on the butt, then curls up in your shorts? And that you refer to it as “daddy-daughter time”? Noted.

Note from Scott: Yes, I would hate it if you told them that.

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How to Develop a Drinking Game (Guest Strip)

I do tend to use a lot of TV and movie quotes in conversation. Even more commonly, I’ll compare whatever I’m talking about to things I remember from TV shows or movies. In the animated Transformers movie, there were these Transformers called Junkions, that could only communicate through copied snippets of TV and radio broadcasts. I’m a lot like them.

It’s not often that you see an explanation that is an example of the very thing it’s explaining.

But what am I doing? I didn’t write this comic, Missy did. We should see if she has any comment.

Missy’s comments: What I find most fascinating is how everything in this strip is still true, 8 years later. Tim Gunn is still rocking Project Runway with high-value words. Shopping at Costco is still a crowded nightmare. Scott still speaks in TV and movie quotes on the regular, and he’s still regularly dying in video games. :)

I do remember when this first ran, readers took issue with the “Alcoholic or not” in the first panel narration, and thought I meant that only alcoholic people played drinking games. (When what I meant was that the drinks could be alcoholic in nature, or not.) It made me have even more respect for how much tight editing Scott always had to do to get stuff to fit in these tiny panels.

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