The Joy of Dieting

See it here.

I confess that I stared at this strip for a long time and couldn't figure out the joke. Then, just when I was ready to give up, it dawned on me that the drawing was meant to suggest Burl and Joy are picking the food off Patty's plate (Patty is their daughter). Note the tiny motion lines near Joy's hand. I also think that Burl may have some sort of food item in his right hand, perhaps a french fry, but it's proximity to the edge of the table and Patty's arm makes it indistinguishable as anything specific.

Still, armed with a good assumption of what the strip is about, I had to face the fact that getting the joke didn't make it funnier, although suddenly some of the marginalia made sense.

I mean, before I figured out what Burl and Joy were up to, I thought Patty was going to watch Invasion of the Locust after they--the locusts--left. You can imagine my confusion about that. Though, in an absurdist way it's funnier than the actual joke of comparing her dieting parents to locusts.

Or, in this case, a single locust. And I think we have a contender for least scary horror/sci fi movie of all time: Invasion of the Locust. One locust shows up, eats a bit of crop, flies away, and no one is the wiser. Unless we're talking about a mutated giant space locust, though once we start doing that, we're really drifting from the point.

Marginalia:

• Beyond the locust movie, there's so much to like about Joy's huge "to-do" sign. Let's start with the fact that she unabashedly displays it in the dining room despite listing several thinly-veiled bits of contempt towards her parents, such as "Lock Diary."
• Despite its size and prominence, she obviously didn't follow all of the directions, since it clearly says she should make "(3) single size portions for dinner" yet, there's "lots more in the oven." I suppose we could give her the benefit of the doubt that she meant "plate (3) single size portions for dinner" but made enough for leftovers. At that point, however, I'm going to make fun of Patty for putting the number 3 in parenthesis needlessly.
• Perhaps the most amazing part of the sign is that she actually had the foresight to indent items on the list so her head would not get in the way of them when viewed from the all important angle of the cartoonist. Patty, clearly, has an awareness that she is trapped in a single-panel comic and is making allowances.
• Does Patty's "USA" shirt reflect guilt at not having been patriotic enough on July 4?
• No idea what's going on with Burl's shirt. One sleeve says "Pong." The other sleeve has a word starting with "P." On the back is what appears to be a (dimpled) golf ball. Since the ball in the video game "Pong" was actually a square, that can't explain the shirt. And since the ball in Ping Pong is not dimpled, that can't explain the shirt. And now I am out of ideas.
• From the post-it notes with the little joke (911=shrink 411=Mom & Dad), I think we can assume that the concentric rectangles on the wall represent Patty's phone. They qualify as the lamest drawing of a phone ever.