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Monday, August 10, 2009

Those damned people

What's Mallard raving about today?

School.

A middle-aged waterfowl is criticizing the inflection used in the classroom.

Am I supposed to believe he's in the 3rd grade?

Not intellectually, mind you. Literally.

17 comments:

Michael Foley said...

What the hell?

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

In Tinsley's world, teachers are basically the same as concentration camp guards, is what the hell. I'm sure we're all familiar by now with his seething hatred of education in general.

Tog said...

Ah, so that's it. Tin's got a burr caught in his colon because someone in authority in grade school spoke to him in a manner to which he was unaccustomed. What a spoiled rotten little bastard he must have been/must be.

If both Li'l Rush and his daddy think the public school system is some sort of dehumanizing Commie factory, why doesn't Dad send Rush go to private school? Or at least challenge the system, rather than recreate it at home? Isn't that, like, surrender-monkeying or something?

And when has anyone, anywhere, required prep time for going back to grade school after summer? Tin! You get an "F!" (Hardly your first, I'm sure.)

Tog said...

(Dammit. Yesterday I misspelled "characteristics" and just now I wrote "why doesn't Dad send Rush go to private school." Enhk!!)

Bill the Splut said...

And when Lil' Rush becomes College-Age Rush, there'll be a strip about how stupid he is because the American school system isn't good enough. Teachers just can't win with this jerk. Maybe Tinsley met one once who was a member of MADD.

dlauthor said...

Every time I think he can't get any more blitheringly incoherent ... well, here we go.

Seriously, and come on, how much "research" did he do before this one? And when did he regain consciousness?

Rootbeer said...

Jokes about vocal inflection simply do not work in comic strip format.

Well, I suppose they could, if the difference in inflection was represented in the lettering of the text... naah, too much work, just write "PEOPLE" in quotes both times, and let the reader use his imagination.

Show of hands, who recalls being addressed in grade school as "people" at all, much less with a specific inflection? No?

It's a fabricated scenario serving no purpose other than as a clumsy set-up to a barely coherent punchline.

Celia said...

Perhaps these issues would be better suited to the confidence of a counsellor, rather than a newspaper cartoon. I had my issues with school too, but they were more to do with my mental problems than any sadism on the part of the teachers.

Unfair though it no doubt is, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is much like Bruce's issue with racism, in that when absolutely everyone is acting a certain way, and telling him he's out of order, it's obviously a conspiracy on the part of some higher authority that exists solely to do him over.

David in NYC said...

Aside from all the other BS in Tinshley's comics, so well described by Davey K and the posters here, this one is really, REALLY stupid.

If little Rush has to explain to his father the correct way to inflect "People", then he already knows more about this than his old man. So, he's laying this crap on his kid -- who already knows it's crap and has to tell the old man the right way to do it.

I understand that alcohol destroys brain cells. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Exhibit A?

exanonymous said...

More often than not, inflection is actually projection.

Rush, why such contempt for your fellow classmates? Living up to your namesake?

Michael Foley said...

I think Celia nailed it.

Conservative talk radio is about convincing angry white men that the reason their life sucks is because liberals and minorities are holding them back.

Mallard Fillmore takes it a step farther, and is an attempt to convince Bruce Tinsley that nothing is his fault. Who'd have thought that someone with multiple DUIs would have issues with personal responsibility!

Frank Stone said...

I'm not sure why Tipsy is still using the generic term "school" when what he really means is "PUBLIC school".

Gotta love the way he describes a classroom of students as an "audience". Because, after all, everyone KNOWS that's how those awful, incompetent, monotonously repetitious "teachers" in those horrible PUBLIC schools regard their students.

Iron Dragon said...

The really frustrating part here is that Tinsley could actually make some decent points about a nonpartisan issue, problems with the educational system is this country. The problem is one that both liberals and conservatives have pointed to, everything from inadequate funding, lesson plans built around rote memorization, standardized testing being the metric we use for determining ability, there are all kinds of issues that could be great fodder for satire, debate and argument.

The problem is that Tinsley seems to hate education in general. In other comics he screams about teachers who try discussion groups, asking a class what they thought of subjects, or trying videos that might make a subject more entertaining/easier to grasp as being lazy or apathetic.

Ducky is Right said...

Usually, I can at least make sort of sense about what the strip was supposed to be about.

Not today. I'm lost. Nothing about this makes any sense.

rewinn said...

Does "Radio Rush" address his audience with the word "people"?

Cuz if so, suddenly today's "comic" makes a lot of sense!

brashieel said...

Okay, I hated the end of summer vacation as much as the next guy, but I'm not still carping about it years later.

Also, I can't really figure out the punchline here. Beyond a total seething hatred of all things scholastic anyway.

Kip W said...

How would that sound, anyway? Do you have to say it like Paul Lynde, or what?

Never mind. I get more enjoyment looking at the hastily scrawled kid-thing in the last panel and pretending the brows are his eyes, the eyes are his nose holes, and the nose is really his mouth. It's still not good cartooning, but it's different, and different from Tin Eye is better.