10 August 2006

The DVD Keeps Blinking 12:00

See it here.

The Dinette Set joins the pantheon of comic strips which hope against hope that difficulty with technology can be transformed into hilarity. Variations on this theme appear time and again in the daily comics.

Leave it to The Dinette Set, however, to attempt to extend this cliche to a piece of technology which has been around since the mid 1990's.

This panel exhibits absolute faith in the principle that it is automatically funny to reference technology and exhibit bafflement in the same space. It's such a sure-fire comedic formula, apparently, it doesn't need to make any sense. It is perfectly fine to require the reader to buy into the premise that Burl and Joy have remained ignorant of how VCRs and DVDs interact with the TV for over two decades.

And yet, if this were not hard enough to accept, there's yet another detail in the panel which can't be missed. Notice how the writing on Joy's cup is jammed into the top half? At first glance, you might think the black blob underneath is Joy's leg. But you'd be wrong. It's the telephone base attached, by a cord, to the phone receiver in Joy's hand.

That's right...Joy and Burl don't own a cordless phone or a mobile phone, either.

Vintage marginalia:
  • Times must be really difficult at The Weather Channel if they had to fire all their call screeners.
  • What exactly does Burl's last line add to the panel? Isn't it just making the same joke as Joy?
  • What the hell is going on outside the window? It looks like a child's stick-figure drawing, but I'm guessing it supposed to be a storm.
  • The DVD is conspicuously "Made in China." What does that matter? Why trot out jingoism for this panel when it was so scrupulously avoided just 3 days ago?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What this strip really needs is an iPod reference.

Lethargic said...

Do you think whoever draws this strip even knows what an iPod is much less what it does?

Anonymous said...

This comic makes my head hurt. For whatever reason the cartoonist subscribes to the theory of quantity over quality. But no matter how much crap you throw at the wall to just to see what will stick, all you're left with in the end is a crap-covered wall. I applaud your ability to deconstruct this garbage every day. My head would explode if I thought about this comic as much as you do.

As to this particular offering, I admit I'm not familiar with the Weather Channel, but do they actually have a live call in show?