Between the Super Bowl today and Valentine’s Day tomorrow, you would think that today’s Funnies page would be lousy with topical punchlines. Not the case! Only a small handful of strips today even broached the subject of Valentine’s Day; Arlo & Janis and Family Circus were the only two I saw that were Super Bowl-themed; the rest of today’s steaming Sunday Strip Platter either talked about cake, childhood trauma, and other similarly hilarious and relatable issues!

The reason for this is simple: comic strip cartoonists must submit their material approximately 76 weeks ahead of schedule in order to ensure their $14,000 yearly income remains stable (unless you’re Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois fame, who gets carted around Weekend at Bernie’s-style and gets paid in children’s organs on a semi-monthly basis).

Still though, there was enough Valentine’s Day material to go around. Mazel Tov, you lovebirds.

Mutts

God, I remember when Mutts started and I didn’t think it deserved to be around even then at the age of 7. I’m not even mad at the punchline, it’s a decent punchline. Breaking the fourth wall like that always makes me a little bit appreciative of the comic artist’s self-awareness. Better than Dagwood’s version of breaking the fourth wall, where he looks directly at the reader and goes “I want to club Blondie over the head with my stupid 9-iron repeatedly, just over and over again without stopping until her dead body starts stinking up the living room.” That’s not funny!

My issue here is obviously the so-cutesy-I-wanna-puke “shmight”. Mooch does this all the time, and I think Debbie from Corpus Christi has always liked this infuriating speech impediment, so it stayed. The comic strip focus groups are always filled with Debbies. I’m going to try approaching my wife tomorrow and saying “Oh, Earl. I think I shmight be in love.” and see if I live until Tuesday.

Sherman’s Lagoon

Here’s a good example of a two-panel joke stretched thin and spread across eight panels instead. You know when you’re eating breakfast at, I don’t know, fuckin’ Denny’s or something and you get those two slices of toast cut into four triangles? Do you use one little packet of jelly for all of it? No, bitches, you use at least one packet per triangle! Sherman’s Lagoon is trying to make the most of just one single crushed packet of shitty jelly.

And it’s not even that good of a joke! Garfield has been doing this “I ate your food” template for over 12 years before Sherman’s Lagoon even existed! In fact, I forgot to check if Garfield and Jon Arbuckle had an identical exchange today. Let’s just pretend they most certainly did and move on.

Sally Forth

It’s a been a long time since I’ve checked in with Sally Forth, but it’s nice to see that she updated her 1982 working mom haircut. Verbose Writer Extraordinaire for the comic strip, Francesco Marciuliano, expects you to set aside about four hours today in order to hack through the strip’s wordy thickets. I don’t expect you do bother reading all that either, so let me bust out the CliffsNotes for today’s Sally Forth:

Ted wants to fuck and he was up all night creating a version of Monopoly that would earn him fuck-points. Teenage daughter Hil not only doesn’t want Ted and Sally to fuck, but she doesn’t want be a party to any event or circumstance that leads to her parents fucking, including, but not limited to, playing Fuck Monopoly.

There, that was definitely fewer words!