Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for July 23, 2011

Actually, sounds a lot more like the teenage daughter…

You must be new here, gmartin. In this strip, wives aren’t vacuous, they’re shrews. It’s the husbands who are clueless. And children are spoiled, ungrateful layabouts.

(I’m not complaining, mind you. I like this strip. But I acknowledge the reliance on stereotypes.)

They have those in Paris!

Perhaps I should have used a smiley at the end of my post, tedcoop, because my use of “shrew,” “clueless,” and “layabouts” were exaggerations to counter gmartin’s use of “vacuous wife.” My apologies.

But I’m NOT new to this strip; I’ve been following it for perhaps 5 years now, and I do indeed see patterns in the roles assigned to the genders (and generations). In those strips dealing with husbands and wives (as opposed to those which take place in a workplace environment), the most familiar scenario is that the husband will do or say something foolish and the wife will return a sarcastic response. It’s far rarer (although not unknown) for those roles to be reversed.

You no doubt are aware that comments to this strip often accuse it of male-bashing, and while I think those who make the accusations are being overly sensitive (OK, I say they “whine like little girls”), their observations about the imbalance between jokes at the expense of men and jokes at the expense of women are pretty much on target. Again, though, I’m a man and I don’t mind that in the least.

In a “Super Fun-Pack Comix” episode of Tom the Dancing Bug a few weeks back, Bolling printed a strip called “Dad’s Stupid!” A boy tells his mother that the lightswitch is broken (or somesuch), and the mother replies “Don’t tell your father, because he’ll try to fix it and make things worse. He’s stupid and incompetent!” and then the mother and son laugh. The last panel shows Dad in the living room reading the paper in his easy chair, and a tear is rolling from his eye because he’s heard every word. Very often, Real Life Adventures would work perfectly as a fill-in for “Dad’s Stupid!” But I still think it’s a funny strip.