Spot the Joke - "Men's interest" magazines.

Today, we present a challenge to the Phil Are GO! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. It sounds easy, but man, nothing could be harder or less funny. Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "comic".

Today's joke challenges come to us from the May, 1962 issue of Inside Story magazine, and the April, 1961 issue of Man's World magazine, respectively. It's time to spot the joke!

Challenge #1 - The Castaways:

Theory #1 - Castaway A's need for a continuing stream of available new shoes stems from his companion's mysterious habit of regurgitating nails all over the tiny island, which are painful. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The land mass they're trapped on was once much larger, and supported by a huge pile of men's shoes. Over the years, the two men have eaten all the shoes, which is a harsh reminder for us all to be better custodians of our precious resources. This is funny.

Theory #3 - Many special-purpose shoes (competitive cycling shoes, electrical linemen's boots) have a resilient stiffening component in the sole, called a "last". To say "that's the last of the shoes" implies that the men have eaten the lasts in the shoes, which are made of nylon, and as a result, are actually inedible. This is funny.

Challenge #2 - The Applicant:

Theory #1 - The would-be employee claims to run slowly. Therefore, she must be a far better pitcher
than hitter. As a result, the man is eager to have her as the new pitcher on the company softball team. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The applicant's slowness means that she won't be taking long stretches of time off of work to train for the Olympics, which is good news to her prospective boss. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The applicant's alleged slowness means that absenteeism due to workplace injuries will be kept to a minimum. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The man has clearly suffered a long career of sexual harassment at the hands of his secretaries. Therefore, he is reassured by her claimed slow-footedness that he could escape her unwanted advances if he needed to. This is funny.

Spot the Joke! - The Saturday Evening Post

Today we present a challenge to the Phil Are GO! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. It sounds easy, but man, nothing could be harder or less funny. Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "uncomic".

Both of today's joke challenges come to us from the April 11, 1953 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Theory #1 - The father was going to give the glass of water to one of the other children in the room, thirsty from long months hiding behind a dresser. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The boy is confused that his half-orc father couldn't find him in the dark, using his infravision. This is funny.

Theory #3 - In the morning, the father starts a new job as a flight engineer, and he needs to pass a drug test. The boy assumes that his father is holding a glass of water, intended for him, when in reality it is a urine sample.  This is funny.

Theory #1 - The man is unfamiliar with the popular mid-century suburban children's game of "Random Audit", and thinks this is a real audit. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The man is horrified that his son did not offer to take the visitor's coat - a serious breach of good manners. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The child from the IRS wasn't supposed to come for another week, and the man doesn't have his gambling receipts in order yet. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The man is upset that his son has finally met his exact duplicate, and will have awkward questions for him. This is funny.

Theory #5 - The man is startled to hear that his son not only has a job, but also is being audited by the IRS. This is funny.

Spot the Joke! - The Saturday Evening Post

Today we present a challenge to the Phil Are GO! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. It sounds easy, but man, nothing could be harder or less funny. Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "uncomic".

Both of today's joke challenges come to us from the August 10, 1968 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Theory #1 - The weight and fortune telling machine, by necessity, has the power of prescience. It is concerned for the man's feelings, because he is about to bowl the worst game of his life. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The weight and fortune telling machine has information about an imminent terrorist attack on soft targets, such as bowling alleys. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The man found the card in his pocket. It is from his wife, who wants him to be home in time for dinner. The machine is non-functional. The reader is left to assume he got the card out of the machine. This is funny.

Theory #4 - Knowing that bowling alley managers dislike unsanitary lanes, the machine has warned the man to avoid them. It did this because the dark spot on the machine indicates to us that the man has just urinated on it, thinking it is a toilet. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The woman cannot tell if the man is the Burgermeister Meisterburger, or the Heat Miser, but definitely a Rankin-Bass character. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The woman is wondering why the man is out jogging, and not in a grocery store, warning people not to squeeze the Charmin. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The cartoonist's name is "Shipu Ji Ji". This is funny.

Spot The Joke! - The Saturday Evening Post

Today we present a challenge to the Phil Are GO! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. It sounds easy, but nothing could be harder or less funny. Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "uncomic".

Both of today's joke challenges come to us from the August 10, 1968 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Theory #1 - The woman's sophistication with regard to wine choice will make her an excellent spouse and/or life partner, but a very expensive one. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The woman, due to her discerning taste in wines, would appear to lead a life of refinement and luxury, despite her having obviously made her dress out of a bit of the meadow. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The lady, having spent a life drinking seventy-eight cent wines, knows one when she tastes one. Therefore, if her date has spent seventy-nine cents on the bottle in question, he has been swindled out of one penny. Depending on their particular state's laws on larceny, this may or may not be funny.

Theory #4 - The lady, whom the viewer may understand to be referring to the bottle of wine, is, in fact, looking at one of the flowers in the meadow. Assuming that the man has prepared the meadow for their date by purchasing and planting each bloom himself (which would generally be regarded as a romantic gesture), one of the flowers seems to be of inferior quality as compared to the other flowers, letting down the lady's experience for the evening. This is funny.

Theory #5 - Rather than being pleased that the man has arranged a romantic date by buying a bottle of wine to enjoy in a moonlit flowered meadow, the woman chooses to focus on the seeming inferiority of the wine. She will marry him regardless, and wait until her husband lies on his death bed, breathing his last, to remind him how he bought her terrible wine on their first date. This is funny.

Theory #6 - Arsenic usually sells for several dollars per bottle... not seventy-nine cents. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The boy has chosen to wash his ducks in a kiddie pool, while his mother expected him to was them in the cargo area of her Subaru wagon, which is famous for its water-tight weather sealing and general build quality. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The boy is bathing his ducks himself, rather than letting the housekeeper do it for him, which is obviously one of her duties. This is funny.

Theory #3 - Despite the fact that the housekeeper reminded him to wash them yesterday, the boy is only just now washing his ducks, while his mother impatiently waits to take them all to the duck cotillion. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The boy is apparently using soap to wash his ducks. The housekeeper has tried time and time again to teach him that a duck's feathers are coated with an oil from the bird's uropygial gland, spread over the bird's plumage by the process of preening, and that soap is neither helpful nor necessary for duck-washing. The boy's inability to understand this is funny.

Theory #5 - Despite being clearly wealthy enough to afford not only ducks, but also a housekeeper, the boy and his mother live in a car. This is funny.

Theory #6 - The boy is washing the ducks he believes belong to his mother, although he bears a greater resemblance to the housekeeper, suggesting that his relationship to the woman in the car is a sham that will ultimately cause him horrible emotional trauma when the truth comes out someday. This is funny.

[Commenter theories will be published in this peer-reviewed journal. -Mgmt.]

Spot the Joke - Ping Pong

The Saturday Evening Post was America's non-threatening comfort food of the brain. It strived for mass appeal by angering no one and being as agreeable to mainstream culture as humanly possible. So, of course there can be no better recipe for great cartoons and a cutting wit, right? Please join the Phil Are GO! Joke-getting Assault Squad in a bit of joke archaeology. Help us figure out what exactly is the joke in this comic from America's blandest news source, the Saturday Evening Post. Help us Spot the Joke!

Theory #1 - The wife likes to make her husband bend over a lot, because he has a prosthetic pelvis that is subject to a manufacturer recall and is due for replacement. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The man needs to lose a little weight, so his wife chose this moment to exaggerate his width, by acting as though she hit the ball "his way", as if he were twenty feet wide. This is funny.

Theory #4 - Hoping to add a little spice to their domestic life, the couple has agreed to play ping pong to decide who will extract information from the prisoners this evening. This is funny.

Theory #3 - That's not a ping pong ball. This is funny.


Jim D. has found a clue! Theory #4, coming your way! - Lamp is set low enough to interfere with husband's vision, high enough for wife's line of sight to be clear. Wife's continuous pretense that she can't see exactly where husband is standing bamboozles husband into thinking playing field is level. Loser subject to extreme sexual humiliation. Thus, wife's statement is sarcastic. Sarcasm is funny.
You see, back in them days, readers was willing to work a little extra harder to "get" the joke. Not like us modern-age devolved folk, who are so dependent on instant gratification that we even resort to watching SpongeBob episodes speeded up on YouTube!


Theory #4 comes to us from "anonymous", doing a very poor job of concealing his identity. - In an attempt to retrieve the ping pong ball, the Wife expels gas in the Husband's direction & feels the need to "warn him" of the impending nasal offense - in his typical fashion. This is funny, in a vengeful sense.

- Mr.FancyHotPants_2 

[Commenter theories will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

Spot the Joke - Wax, legs and rice.

The Saturday Evening Post was America's non-threatening comfort food of the brain. It strived for mass appeal by angering no one and being as agreeable to mainstream culture as humanly possible. So, of course there can be no better recipe for great cartoons and a cutting wit, right?Please join the Phil Are GO! Joke-getting Assault Squad in a bit of joke archaeology. Help us figure out what exactly is the joke in these comics from America's blandest news source, the Saturday Evening Post. Help us Spot the Joke!

Theory #1 - The woman has just waxed the kitchen floor, and just as it rains whenever you wash the car, a thundercloud has taken up residence over her house, casting an obvious shadow on the roof. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Waxed things are slippery. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The wax on her kitchen floor is so slippery that, after she spilled a pot of soup on the floor, the liquid was repelled onto the ceiling. Hence, the damp spot on the roof. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The gentleman is a paraplegic. He has misplaced his special buoyant prosthetics made from a rigid, closed-cell foam with a watertight rubber skin, or his "sea legs". He is forced to make due with his ordinary plastic prosthetic legs. The two women have thrown his floating legs overboard. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Women enjoy seeing any man suffer. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The nauseated gentleman is apparently searching the deck of the ship for his "sea legs", despite the rather obvious fact that they are clearly still attached to his body. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The "man" crawling around the deck of the ship is actually Katharine Cook Briggs, half of the team who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire. Her partner and daughter, Isabel Briggs-Meyers would be surprised that her mother had chosen to drink while aboard a ship: something an "ISFJ" would never do. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The man's digestive system is intolerant of the spices used in Spanish rice. The adult diapers he keeps on hand are "Tango" brand adult incontinence undergarments. His wife's advice to "put on some tangos" indicates her understanding that he will have a bout of inflammatory bowel syndrome tonight. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Tango is a dance mistakenly attributed to Spain, although it actually originated in Argentina and Uruguay. Spanish rice is a totally unknown dish in either Spain or Mexico. This is funny.

Theory #3 - A Tango is a type of dance, not a type of music. Theoretically, one could tango to any music with a beat. So, the woman's request to "put on some tangos" must indicate that the disc in the man's hand is a laser video disc, since a Tango can only be observed and not heard. This cartoon ran in the September 28, 1957 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, nearly thirty years before LaserDisc technology was made available to the American public. It is impossible that the couple owned a LaserDisc player in 1957, or that Bob Barnes, the cartoonist, had even heard of such a thing. This is funny.

[Commenter theories will be added to the post. -Mgmt.]

Spot the Joke - Household chores.

Humor challenge, now, from 1949, the era before jokes were funny! Accept the challenge faced every day by the P.A.G! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. Maybe you've laughed at a baby falling down the stairs, or Scary Movie 3, so you think you can laugh at anything? Think again! Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "uncomic".

Theory #1 - The beleaguered couple has been forced to store their tomato slices on the counter, next to the sink, because their tomato rack is in disrepair. Instead of simply replacing the often-broken tomato rack, the spendthrift husband will attempt to repair it, despite his total lack of any qualifying skill. This is funny.

Theory #2 - After inviting their friends over for Saturday brunch, the wife now regrets complaining about washing all the dishes, now that her husband has apparently decided to murder their guests and dismember the bodies. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The husband is about to grudgingly begun to make good on his promise to "build lunch". This is funny.

Theory #4 - The husband is about to tackle a handful of household chores, which is odd. Usually a breakfast of "splats" leaves him tired and sleepy.

Theory #5 comes to us from comedy supersleith MisterFancyHotBalls_2. Thanks MFHB2! - The Husband has realized the Wife has become unchained from stove again, & no longer pregnant. So he will be building her a small "kitchen cage", after nailing the twin beds together for the evening. This is funny (in a sexist way).

Theory #1 - The woman has produced four puffs of breath, while the dog has produced three. This indicates that the woman was laboring harder than the dog during their walk. She will probably suffer from heart disease in her autumn years. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The homeowners have apparently purchased an area rug designed and signed by the profoundly unfunny comic artist Ted Key, who is not known for his understanding of humor or rug-making skill. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The wall is named "Hazel". This is funny.

Theory #4 - The dogwalker has returned, not to her own house, but to the home of Lucille Ball, who is either too polite or to frightened to alert the angry intruder to her mistake. This is funny.

Theory #5 - Both the dog and the woman are steam-powered. This is funny.

Theory #6 has been postulated by MisterfancyHotBalls_2 for your sanitation. Thanks again for helping us understand the comedy of the unfunny past, MFHB2! -  Housewife "Maria" is unhappy that her maid has just walked in with her son, who looks strangely similar to her husband "Arnold". This is funny(?) 

[Commenter theories will be published in this peer-reviewed journal.   -Mgmt.]

Spot the Joke - Rough treatment.

Today we present a challenge to the Phil Are GO! Joke-Getting Assault Squad (JGAS), our hand-picked group of the most charitable and sympathetic staffers. Their task? To figure out why these are comics. It sounds easy, but nothing could be harder or less funny. Do you think you understand why these comics are comical? See if you can Spot The Joke! The JGAS's analysis is posted after each "uncomic".

Theory #1 - The guest is very excited to meet the wife of the tired man with repetitive stress injury. Surely she must be a handful in bed. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Having let his membership in the Antelope Lodge lapse, the older gentleman has forgotten the secret handshake, resulting in Wrist Failure after attempting the handshake with the younger man. He is angry with himself that his prospective son-in-law is both a member and an expert Antelope handshaker. This makes apparent the balding man's mortality. This is funny.

Theory #3 - A young man with a cocaine habit is meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time. He is hoping they can "score him some good shit", when they actually cannot. They will see him as a threat to their daughter's future, and will have him murdered, and his organs sold overseas. The proceeds will be used to fund the father's meth habit. This is funny.

Theory #4 - Ted Key is not funny. This is funny.

Theory #5 comes to us from long-time theorizer Sue. Thanks for the data, Sue! - When meeting the new neighbors, make sure the lady of the house receives a vigorous, enthusiastic hand shake so your wife can go in for the copping of the feel.

Theory #6 was posited by MisterFancyHotBalls 2. Thanks, MisterFancyHotBalls 2! - New NBC pilot: Pee-Wee Herman's older "Life Partner" realizes the onset of his Parkinson's just as Pee-Wee greets the 2 Broke Lesbian B's from across the hall in Apt. 2B.

(Joey from "Friends" also stars - not pictured)

This would NOT be funny.

Theory #1 - The passenger has convinced the driver that the windshield is dirty, so he navigates by poking his head out the side window. In reality, the passenger simply has his hat pulled down over his eyes. The driver does not know this, and is risking decapitation or a pulled trapezius muscle for nothing. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The driver has obviously missed the fact that the passenger has already bumped his head on the roof of the vehicle, making it clear that he never pays attention to his partner. This has been a frustrating theme for the couple in their relationship, and the driver will sleep on the couch again tonight. This is funny.

Theory #3 - Underfunded cities that cannot afford to maintain the roads also find it difficult to repair the leaf springs on their mail delivery trucks, due to budget constraints and a dwindling tax base. Law enforcement and public assistance take precedence over infrastructure spending. This is funny.

Theory #4 - Some vehicles in 1949 still required a crank to start the motor, and each postal route was handled by two letter carriers. This is funny.

[Commenter theories will be published in this peer-reviewed journal.   -Mgmt.]