Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for March 24, 2022

The extension… people below a certain age will have no concept of what that is.

Hey Man, she doesn’t care a whit about you. Jackass.

Wowser…

I’m sure it helped her find her words…

Although there are currently hi-tech ways of listening in on someone’s cell phone.

Go ahead and use bad words, Joanie!!

There are symbols used in comic strips: $%#*&@?!

Looks like “the complete jackass” is also a control freak.

Wouldn’t even allow his GF a private conversation with her own mother!!

Let’s have Kim back, she’s much more fun.

“Jackass” is such an understatement for our (not-so) lovable Zeke!

I don’t remember this one…………………awesome.

At least Zeke is complete!

IIRC Alex e-mailed everyone she knew with news of the engagement. Evidently Joan doesn’t check her e-mail very often. As someone else has surely mentioned over the past three days but it’s my turn to mention it today. :-)

“But Mom, he completes me”

It’s something in the hair, right?

Tell it mama!

Now, this Doonesbury cartoon I like. Man, I like this woman. Show me more.

No news is good news, right? No. No news is ignorance. Ignorance is bliss, right? No. Good news is bliss. Have a happy life Mike.

Let’s not forget the ultimate luxury, the WATS line.

 A Grim Milestone

COVID-19 has now killed over a million Americans. For comparison:

Civil War: ~620,000

Great Chicago fire: ~300

Peshtigo fire: ~2,000

WW1: 116,516

Spanish flu: ~675,000

Tulsa race massacre: ~300

Pearl Harbor: 2,403

WW2: 418,500

Korean War: 33,686

Vietnam War: 58,220

Oklahoma City bombing: 168

9/11: 2,977

Afghan War: 6,301

So the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in human history, with 4% of the world’s population, has racked up 16% of its COVID deaths.

Why? Or, more pertinently, who?

How many of those million American corpses would be alive today if the former guy had shown awareness, concern, moral courage, and real leadership by treating the pandemic as a serious, non-partisan public-health matter instead of trivializing, minimizing, and politicizing it? Just because HE was getting the best medical care money could buy (at taxpayer expense) didn’t mean everybody else was.

Granted, his monumental ignorance, arrogance, intransigence, and narcissism don’t amount to premeditated murder, but there’s a convincing case to be made for contributory negligence on a massive scale. It’s like applauding enthusiastically while the kids next door take turns throwing lighted matches on a pile of oily rags.

She is holding back. What does she really think of him. ;-D

Joan divorced her husband (and left her daughter behind) because her husband was a condescending, clueless, chauvinistic jerk.[**]

J.J. divorced her husband (and left her daughter behind) because she realized she was [still] in love with someone else.

Admittedly, Joan made it clear to her husband that she was unhappy in her marriage while J.J., well, she didn’t convey that as well as she could have, I suppose, but still, an interesting contrast.

The forum is simply not allowing me the luxury of a “barrier” between the main body of the post and a footnote, so here’s the footnote:

I’ve seen references to Joan’s husband having been physically abusive but from what I remember from reading the relevant strips in a collection, this was not the case. I suppose it’s possible that the collection omitted those strips, but I honestly doubt that any comic strip would’ve gotten away with depicting domestic violence in the 1970s, certainly not in a humor strip (as opposed to a “dramatic” strip like “Rex Morgan 3D” or “Apartment M.D.” OSLT).

Zeke probably reminds JJ of her father – he was a jackass too.

What a mild insult!

“You thought I’d be bummed? Well guess what — you’re right!”

“You were right,” Joan. Grammar.

Attaboy,Joanie.

And speaking of complete jackasses,somebody tell Senator Cruz of Texas that his strait jacket is untucked in the back.

I remember when Aunt Bea was the telephone operator on the Andy Griffith show.Andy would contact Aunt Bea and ask her to place a call, which she did.Andy would then say: “You can hang up now Aunt Bea.”

I’ve got five bucks that says that she would’ve held her tongue if Zeke hadn’t chimed in.

Opinionated moms (or dads for that matter), don’t mind insulting you to your face. I was once insulted by means of a shouted rant in a coffeehouse, in front of a table of friends, by the mother of a woman I had been dating. She apparently had not been updated to the fact that her daughter was currently moping about unhappily because of a completely different guy .

Never got an apology, by the way.

So Joanie has had not any contact with Alex for over a year? Alex is very verbal about her dislike of Uncle Stupidhead.

J.J. is the textbook example of someone in a Co-Dependant relationship. Zeke is a jerk, a mooch, a money-grubber, and utterly clueless, yet she still claims to “love him”.

Cell phone users have the volume up or are on speaker, so it is the same experience.

Did Joanie ever disown JJ for this?

Way off-topic, but has Joan’s maiden name ever been revealed? If J.J.‘s last name is Caucus, that means that Caucus is Joan’s married name.

Notice how Joanie waited until she knew Zeke was listening before insulting him. Why waste a perfectly good (and well deserved) insult?

Zeke, the ideal son in law.

Tell it like it is Mom.

From the spacing of the last word balloon, I wonder if it had something even stronger and the editor changed it. Stephan Pastis of Pearls before Swine is always pointing out in his books how you can see where the editor made him change something.

It’s in code. Like cursive.

Pick another word. Jackass doesn’t cover it.

So… she knew about the jackass enough to label him as such, but didn’t think the marriage was kaput?

You would think the first thing to ask is where is my granddaughter?

She’s glad he’s on the other extension.