How to React to Something Amazing

No situation is ever made better by yelling “Geez.”  Just saying the word instantly robs you of any gravitas or illusion of having the upper hand.

Here, I’ll prove it. Picture Liam Neeson saying the following.

“I can tell you I don't have money... but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. I mean, geez!”

I think the problem is that everyone knows that “Geez” is the midway point between saying “Gee,” and shouting “Jesus!” Saying “geez” tells the listener that you really want to curse, but you can’t quite bring yourself to do it, and if you can’t bring yourself to say something drastic, what are the odds that you can bring yourself to do something drastic?

Of course, I could be wrong. Geez may have some deep meaning. For all I know, when you yell “Geez” you could be calling out to Saint Geez, the patron saint of ineffectual anger.

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How to Cope with Jealousy

I’ve always thought that it would be cool to have a themed wedding based on the end credits of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, which may just prove that my definition of the word “cool” is a bit off. Of course, you’d have to hold your wedding in a paved drainage canal, but then again, if your bride-to-be agreed to your best man wearing a jacket with no shirt underneath, she’ll probably agree to anything.

You might have better luck with a wedding themed after the end credits of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou instead, as it’s the same exact thing, except that it’s by the water, and they end up on a boat, which would be a great place to hold the reception.

Note from Missy: the only issue being that both of those end credits only have one woman in them, and the day there’s a wedding where the only woman involved is the bride is a day I’ll eat my hat. (Side note: dammit, Hollywood, can we get over the single-woman-in-a-sausage-fest-movie trope already?)

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How to Wallow in Unbridled Hedonism

For a brief time, my older brother and I both worked at the same Pizza Hut. The woman who ran the place was smart enough to avoid having the two of us work together unsupervised if she could at all help it.

I remember one time my brother and I were the only people in the kitchen, and one waitress was out front, tending to the customers and maintaining a safe distance from our idiocy. My older brother made himself a pizza with a solid base of red pepper flakes between the crust and the sauce, and another layer between the sauce and the cheese. That’s how I know that a person’s taste buds can turn white and fall off.

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How to Be a Gentleman

Timely!

When I describe this comic as “timely,” it’s with the understanding that from a woman’s point of view it was probably equally timely at any random point between this moment and the beginning of recorded time. Right now, the comic seems especially timely to us men, because we’re just beginning to wake up to how serious the problem’s always been.

It’s an interesting point, I think. Not a funny point, like, at all, but interesting.

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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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