How to Retroactively Ruin a Joke

I believe that the best way to act after you’ve told a joke is to act like there was no joke, whether the joke was successful or not. If the joke didn’t work, no amount of explaining the premise or pressing your audience to “lighten up” will save it; and if the joke worked, making a face, laughing at your own wit, or reminding people what a  great joke you just told will only kill whatever laugh and positive feelings you might have created.

This is just an opinion.

The opinion of a man who is sitting here writing about a series of jokes he came up with nearly a decade ago, thus ignoring his own advice.

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How to Hide the Fact That You're Out of Your Gourd on Cold Medicine

I wrote this after spending eight hours working closely with a coworker who was blasted on cold meds. It was a pain doing a major portion of her work, but the fun of watching her spend the day groggily insisting that the medication wasn’t having any effect on her more than made up for it.

Note from Missy: The last line in the first panel just made me LOL; I’m so glad Scott gave it to me. Scott didn’t hear me LOL, though, because he’s wearing his VR helmet and headphones, playing Star Trek: Bridge Crew.  That particular punchline writes itself.

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How to make a Public Service Announcement

Real, reliable production of the comic ramped up in 2006. This comic ran at the end of 2010, so by this point I’d had three years of replying to multiple helpful readers pointing out that I had put the wrong copyright date on the comic. They really did! Multiple people! Every year, every comic that had the earlier copyright date. Some of them got surprisingly snotty about it.

The sheer repetition of the issue is what caused my tone to turn so combative.

If I ever am in a position to publicly berate someone, I hope I have the wherewithal to do it while wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot.

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How to Utilize Research to Maximize Chances for Success

Sadly, we all know that someone with low enough personal standards could pitch a cartoon featuring Nervous Bladder and Irritable Bowel to any one of several cable channels I can think of, and they’d at least be considered.

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How to Describe Food

For most of the time we’ve been married, Missy and I have referred to beef meatballs as “beefmeat balls.” I don’t remember who started it, but I’m 99.9% sure it was me. It sounds like the kind of thing I’d come up with. That might come off as bragging, but believe me, it’s not.

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How to Show a New Co-Worker "The Ropes"

Shortly before I wrote this comic, I went to the movies. Just by chance, two friends from work happened to be going to the same movie, at the same theater, and were there for the same showing. Athena was one of them. I ended up taking the photos I needed to put them in the comic, the photos these images of Athena were drawn from, in the lobby of the theater.

The theater was the AMC at Disney’s Pleasure Island (now Disney Springs). Anybody who has gone to Pleasure Island/Disney Springs will remember that theater, because everyone who sees it has one of two thoughts:

Who goes to Walt Disney World and goes to a movie?

or 

I bet it’s air conditioned in there, and I could sit down in a nice, padded chair, and my kids wouldn’t be able to ask me to buy anything, for TWO WHOLE HOURS!

In case you’re curious, the movie we saw was Jackass 3D, one of the least Disney-ish films I can think of.

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How to Make the Most of Working the Early Shift

It could be argued that Mullet-Boss did sabotage himself when he hired his staff. You don’t hire any of the malcontents, layabouts, and frauds I created in this comic unless, on some level, you want to go bankrupt.

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How to Uncover a Disturbing Secret

I am of course referring to Dr. Bronner’s, which people often praise as being the soap you can use for anything you might use soap for.

It’s an amazing commentary on marketing that there’s a brand of soap that can make a virtue of the fact that you can use it for any problem which calls for soap. Somehow, we’ve allowed soap to get far too specialized. You wouldn’t use shampoo to wash your dishes, or at least you wouldn’t want anyone to catch you using shampoo to wash your dishes.

Anyway, without getting too graphic, I will mention that using diluted peppermint-scented Dr. Bronners as a body wash can result in a sensation like “Jack Frost, blowing on my junk.” If that sounds appealing, give it a try. I won’t judge.

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How to Learn about Other People's Interests

I made this comic eight years ago. I’m a bit more enlightened now. I understand that people who dress in animal costumes for recreational purposes prefer to be called Furries. I also now understand that many—some say most—of them derive no sexual pleasure from the activity at all.

In my defense, (and it is a weak defense) at the time I wrote this I was a cast member at Walt Disney World, and frankly, the idea that any human being would put on one of those hot, heavy, uncomfortable, expensive suits for recreational purposes was beyond me.

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How to Avoid Workplace Drama

I once had a coworker go off on a tangent about how the lowest thing you could do was discuss someone’s flaws behind their back. He went on to name several of our coworkers, none of whom were present, who were guilty of criticizing people who weren’t present. When we called him a hypocrite, the fact that we did it to his face instead of behind his back didn’t seem to make it less offensive to him.

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