This cartoon plays into several mythological stereotypes that I don’t subscribe to, but cartoons often use stereotypes and cultural myths as a common platform for humor. Let’s discuss the ones I used above, one at a time.

1) Heaven as a place in the sky where dead people get to fly around and be ecstatic for eternity. First, how harp music relates to bliss is not clear to me. This idea must have been invented at a time in history during which the harp was as popular as autotune is now. Also, this myth clearly comes from a time when people were not capable of seeing what was above the clouds. Now that we can see clouds from all angles and very far out into space, we know there’s no place like this close to here. Of course, you could just believe it’s there, but it’s invisible. That kind of workaround is always a good option for quelling one’s cognitive dissonance.

2) God is a single character of some kind who interferes in human’s lives. This is a difficult thing to make logical sense of, too, because of a lack of credible evidence. Sure, there are plenty of people who experience terrifically good luck in some way or another and automatically attribute it to “divine intervention”. But then there are far more people praying or being prayed for who never get the relief they desperately need, want or deserve, so what about them? "Not enough faith,” some would say. Nice move. Great way to put the blame on the victim. Very helpful. So the evidence for divine intervention—for good, anyway—is pretty scant, to say the least. And then there is the multitude of sporting events each week where both teams pray to win and one virtually always loses. Maybe those teams just had more sinners on them.

3) God is referred to as “he”, which means he’s male. Why would an omnipotent, eternal being who created the known universe just by thinking about it need a physical reproductive tool? Or could his maleness simply be a construct by human males to maintain authority over women here on earth? Hmmm…

4) Missing socks are stolen by the creator of the universe as a joke. This one knocks down pretty easily. The immortal creator of everything that exists—including humor—would have a better sense of humor. Stealing a sock from someone’s laundry isn’t very funny.

The above cartoon probably isn’t all that funny, either, but then, I’m not the creator of humor. I’m just an average soul trying to use it to get through this weird existence I suddenly found myself in back in the mid-nineteen hundreds.

NOW let’s find out what weird existence Wayno has found himself in this week…

As for me, I am not surprised at all that there are smartphones are in Hell. There’s definitely Facebook.

In this novel, Atticus Finch attempts to prevent his cat from killing birds but fails. By the end of the book, even his surname is a lifeless mangle of feathers.

LOVE this one! My jack-o’-lantern themes this year will be a bowling ball, a basketball, and a beachball.

And also, is there another word in the English language that has an apostrophe followed by a hyphen?

Perhaps he’d feel less conspicuous if he were wearing a sailor shirt and no pants. It worked for decades for Donald Duck.

I actually, literally, in realtime saw this happen with a 17-year-old girl at the DMV in Los Angeles getting her driver’s license pic. She asked to take several shots, to see each for approval and to choose a filter. The photographer was polite but firm and she ended up with the same kind of serial-killer mugshot the rest of us get. Can’t hurt to ask, though, right?

But does it smell like a full diaper and expect you to bribe someone to get it into college?

Thus ends our magical history tour of last week’s cartoons. Thanks for hallucinating along with us, Jazz Pickles. if you like what we do and that we do it for free, without ads, please point an eyeball at some of the links below which help us to keep the donkeys in fresh hay here at Rancho Bizarro. We’ll be much obliged.

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