Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for August 14, 2021

Not even the Joker finds this funny.

I’ll read today’s comic Saturday night. But for the record …

I just commented on Friday’s strip, with a couple of similarly corny jokes to the ones Phoebe and Marigold were telling. You’re welcome. :)

well, all went well that ended well, right?

Some surprises are … surprisier … than others.

Comedy gold.

Something other than a unicorn who?

2+2=WEED EATER

And the essence of a JOKE is all in how you tell it.

@Concretionist Some surprises are worth prizes. (This one doesn’t.)

I’m surprised that’s considered humour, so…

Surprised? I was more shocked.

It’s funny cause it’s not funny. Ha ha ha (Antiyonder laughs nervously).

“That isn’t a joke.”

(imagines a different version of this dialogue (That was not a joke))

A unicorn once tried to joke / To an audience the joke she did spoke / The crowd were…

…so enamoured of the sight of the unicorn that the unicorn had to put up the Shield of Boringness quickly to avoid being mobbed.

Yeah, I stink at limericks!

Wha-wha-wha-wha-whaaaaaaaaaaaa

“So he says, ‘What are you talking about? That’s not my dog.’”

I actually liked it.

I don’t know if that’s true. Sometimes telegraphed events or meta commentary spoken by characters in the story can be pretty funny, and there’s little surprise in that.

Like if you have a comedic show where the characters go through a bad event, and one of them says, “at least things can’t get worse,” we already know it will. We don’t know how, so there’s some element of surprise in that, but we won’t be surprised when things do go wrong.

Plus, all surprise is out the window when you’re rewatching a comedy. You already know what’s coming, and that doesn’t necessarily make it less funny.

Why did I type all this?

There are so many creatures both natural and super-natural.

This “joke” seems to be foreshadowing Marigold revealing who she is as a human. I speculate that Marigold is Phoebe’s grandmother.