Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 26, 2015

Miss Plainwell has been hanging around Frazz too long.

I’m pretty sure she was a runner before she met Frazz.

What exactly did she say?…….Sounds like gibberish to me….

She didn’t pick her starting spot well and got crowded in by all the people who are getting their one run a year as preparation for overstuffing themselves with turkey and stuffing. So she couldn’t run as fast as she wanted too.

The area where the runners gather for the start is sometimes referred to as a corral.

I, for one, would be thankful if this strip were to devote nearly as much effort to being funny as it does to being smug and sanctimonious. Maybe next year. (Yeah, right.)

When I was in eighth grade, my dad and I decided to run a turkey trot near my grandparent’s place. The race had two distances, 2.5 and 7.5, both starting at the same time. During the start of the race, I wasn’t paying close attention to where the paths diverged.Suffice to say that I set a new personal distance record that day.

She’s actually admitting she was a dummy because she should have known better and messed up. She doesn’t mind the non-racers. The more the merrier. The only ones in the turkey trot who are really irritating are those who are slow but line up near the front, making hundreds of faster runners behind them go around them in the first mile.

Agreeing with BigPuma et-al on this one.

For me to understand this strip, I had to pierce through multiple cultural ‘layers’.

The first cultural layer is as a non-US resident I didn’t know what a turkey trot is – and the assumed understanding that it involves a large amount of people running some sort of marathon. I could infer it, but that’s not the point.

The second cultural layer is the one a few people have already alluded to – that of the superior runner being inconvenienced by slower runners. This is a runner’s in-joke.

A possible third cultural layer which wasn’t an issue for me as a Westerner aware of American culture is whether you understand the unspoken reference to Thanksgiving.

With so many layers acting to filter out the unwanted readers did the number of people remaining to actually get the joke became too small for it to be worth making it?

I do not understand how anyone would want to change any comic strip to meet their own personal criteria. This strip makes me think and is funny. Interpretation should be Caldwell’s middle name..

Thanks for the explanations.I thought the turkey trot was the northern version of Montezuma’s revenge.

Agree! As someone who finds almost everything interesting, search engines are a dangerous drain on my productivity!Perhaps I should go cold turkey :)

“Why bother making people chuckle when you can show them how smart and superior you are?” Seems to me (and anyone not determined to prove how superior they are) that most of the people reading this strip find it humorous. I don’t read Pastis, for example, because it often comes across as overly snide to me, so I avoid it. But that’s just my opinion; it would be a waste of my time to read it daily just so I can tell people why they shouldn’t like it.