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Saturday, May 07, 2005

Who wants to play a game?

Okay, boys and girls, let's play a game of "Name That Quote." I have assembled for you a list of 10 of my favorite comic strip quotes of all time - quotes that forced me to stop reading because I was laughing so hard. Your challenge is to identify the strip in which the quote was said and the character who said it. There are, therefore, 20 points possible.

You're welcome and encouraged to post your answers as comments in a spirit of convivial work-together-ness, or if you'd rather e-mail your answers to me that's certainly fine too.

These are all quotes from regular in-the-paper comic strips (nothing tricky), although five of the strips quoted are no longer being made. Also, all these quotes were entered from memory - I'm 99% sure they're accurate, but there might a slight wording difference.

Good luck!

1. Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia. - Correctly identified as being said by Howland Owl in Pogo. It's the punch line conclusion to a huge stretch of strips where the Okefenokee gang notices there's a Georgia in the USSR and freak out that somehow the Soviets have stolen it. With Christmas coming, they fret, what if Santa Claus goes to Georgia's new location and ends up getting lost and assuming that the rest of the Southeast is just gone? Pogo compilations are hard to find, but absolutely worth the effort and money, especially if you've never read the strip before; in my opinion the best comic strip ever in the paper.

2. Who the dickens is Dan Fogerburp?!? - Correctly identified as being said by Opus in Bloom County, a proud product of Iowa City. Opus is freaking out because his fiancee Lola tells him she has a tattoo of Dan Fogelberg.

3. You stupid darkness!! - Correctly identified as being said by Lucy in Peanuts. "I have heard it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness," says Linus to Charlie Brown. "That's true," replies Charlie Brown, "although there will always be those who will disagree with you." The third panel is Lucy standing out in the night yelling.

4. I just like to say "smock." Smock smock smock smock smock! - Correctly identified as being said by Hobbes in Calvin & Hobbes.

5. I am the master of all window treatments! - Correctly identified as being said by Bucky Katt in Get Fuzzy (while on a catnip binge).

6. If Jon's socks are in this drink... where is the ice? - Correctly identified as being said by Garfield in Garfield, which spent many years being only somewhat funny but has massively rebounded of late and is often the funniest strip in the paper on a given day these days. "My feet are cold." Classic stuff!

7. Clearly, J.R.R. Tolkien never played D&D. - Correctly identified as being said by Jason Fox in FoxTrot.

8. What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it's all about? - Successfully evaded identification. Said by Jeremy Duncan in Zits. Jeremy's sitting around his room with his chum Hector and apparently thinking deep life thoughts.

9. They can make me do it, but they can't make me do it with dignity. - Correctly identified as being said by Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes. Calvin pitches an enormous fit about bathtime and then in the final panel grins merrily at the reader and says this line.

10. Car! - Correctly identified as being said by a random cow in The Far Side (no website for this one - here's why). I'll bet many of you have seen this one - a bunch of cows are standing around all bipedal-ish in a field and one of them yells, "Car!" In the next panel (sort of - The Far Side didn't really use panels) they're all standing around on all fours like regular cows. Then in the last panel they're standing upright again.


Comments:
Hmmm... I am clueless as ever. Now if you'd designed a contest to DRAW a funny cartoon for each of these punchlines...I probably still would not have anything substantive to contribute, but I sure would enjoy looking at other people's.
 
I think #4 and #9 are both Calvin and Hobbes - I want to say Hobbes said the smock thing, and Calvin said the bit about dignity.

#6 suggests Garfield to me, but other than Garfield I'm not sure who would have said it, and if it was a prank then it was probably Garfield that did it. I don't recall Odie talking much.

Cheap trick on #10, by the way. I can't even Google it. :-)
 
#6 was suggesting Garfield to me too, but only because I couldn't think of any other Jon-without-an-H. However, I could not quite see one of Charlie's favorite comic strip quotes being from such a normally painfully unfunny comic. (This line has potential, though.)
 
Hey, fun! Thanks for playing along, everyone. Greg's currently in second place with six points (albeit sort of a distant second behind Joel, who took advantage of the fact that he and I grew up reading the same comic books to get 8 of 'em in an e-mail earlier today).

I'll edit the post to include those correctly-answered here and eventually just spill the beans on all of 'em, but let's play a while longer.

A couple of hints - #'s 8 and 10 are both the entire speaking content of the entire strip (the rest of them are all excerpted from conversations). #2 was drawn right here in Iowa City.

Also, to my chagrin it was pointed out to me (by Joel) that 5, not 4, of the strips are no longer being made. I'll correct that right away, too.

Also also, hi, Lisa! Welcome to the Meaningless Musings community, such as it is. Coffee and snacks over by the wall.
 
I've got answers for #2, #3, and #7, but I had to Google them so I'm not sure if they count or not. Perhaps I should let the actual smart people post answers. :-)
 
I'm pretty sure #2 was said by Opus in Bloom County. But I have not looked it up. Nor have I located the coffee or snacks.
 
I think that #5 is Buckey in Get Fuzzy and #7 is Jason in Fox Trot??? Other than that, the only other ones I would have guessed at are already 'correctly identified'.
I feel like I should know #8, but I can't decide what it might be.
Good game!
Carrie D.
 
Three more identified correctly! Man, this is fun. Two people have now also ID'd number 1 and number 3, so I'll put those up as identified, too. Only two to go!
 
CAR! Is a Far Side, with the cows that only get on all fours and eat grass when a car goes by, right?

And, I LOVE GET FUZZY. But I didn't get that one. Or, really, any of the others.
Ivy
 
The Far Side indeed! Nine down, one to go. Here's a hint for #8 - the speaker's initials are J.D.

I hope that FoxTrot and Get Fuzzy are both available in Canada, Lisa; they're two of the best strips out there. Get Fuzzy, in particular, is (all in my opinion, of course) the heir apparent to Calvin and Hobbes (which was the heir apparent to Peanuts, which was the heir apparent to Pogo, which had (indeed, has) no peers) for best strip in the papers. I'll go back and add URL's for those strips that I can find URL's for - FoxTrot and Get Fuzzy are both available online for your daily reading pleasure.
 
And I'm not sure what happened to the coffee and snacks guys... I knew I was in trouble when the caterers unionized.
 
Now that you have told us the answers... I totally should have known the car! one. More quizzes!! This is fun. (As soon as somebody gets number 8.)
 
So where's the Hokey Pokey thing from? I'm skeptical that you can really attribute this to a comic; it's one of life's universal questions, right? But I want to see where *you* saw it. :-)
 
I cheated and googled the Hokey Pokey one. I won't say what comic I found it in just in case it's the one you're referencing, but the character's initials are not J.D. (unless he has a "full" name I don't know about) so I doubt it is. In any case, I think the character who spoke the line in this strip is a dog.

Also, evidently it's a line from a Jimmy Buffett song...?
 
Interesting... it never occurred to me that a quote might not be unique to its particular comment. #8 is from Zits; Jeremy's sitting around in his room with his friend Hector and is moved to wax philosophical. Which one did you find, Ivy?

Thanks for playing, everyone! "Name that Quote, Part 2: Meaningless Musings at the Movies" will be coming soon.
 
Okay, but no Kevin Smith, no Star Wars, no Muppets, and no . . . wait, those are the only ones I'd get. Never mind.
 
Hooray, Lisa-from-Canada, we can suck together. :-)
 
Lisa, that comment was totally made IN CONTEXT and taken OUT OF IT! Sheesh. ;-)
 
The hokey-pokey comic I found was in Mother Goose & Grimm, which I don't think I had seen in our papers before. But it was kind of cute.

Bring on the movie quotes!
 
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