Dow-own
on May 28, 2013 at 12:01 amChapter: Sexuality and the Modern Joyce
Characters: Howard Lesse, Joe Rosenthal
Location: Read Hall commons
down dooby doo down down
comma comma
Look, I don’t know what’s going on in this strip, either.
down dooby doo down down
comma comma
Look, I don’t know what’s going on in this strip, either.
Loading ...
I feel like we skipped a strip…
I checked itswalky.com. We didn’t.
Huh. Still find it kinda odd that we just ended the last story with Joyce running out of the room with no resolve to that…
I’m sure it made sense at one point.
What do you mean?
Joe and Howard are waiting at an elevator. Howard says some total loser nerd shit and Joe gets sick of it.
If you mean weird random time skip then yeah I guess.
That doesn’t even help. It makes just as much sense the other way: one for down and two for “u-hup”.
I believe that is the joke?
I just always presumed it was something of a filler for a busier than normal period.
Dow-own? Maybe it was a stock market joke.
This is one of those strips that makes you step back and scratch your head.
Also, what happened to the whole “Joe made Joyce cry” plot thread? We’re just dropping that all of a sudden, okay, whatever.
Some bores don’t care that they’re boring others, because they just want to hear themselves talk, whether others are interested, feigning interest while searching for a graceful exit, or in a glaze-eyed trance.
Other bores genuinely aren’t aware that they’re boring others. They’re neither conceited nor arrogant; they just have no social skills whatsoever.
I suspect Howard is the latter type. Poor guy.
I’m literally autistic and have great difficulty not talking about things that interest me even when I’m directly told people don’t care right now, so there’s that category, too.
Honestly, I figured it was something Mr. Willis just thought of as he was waiting for an elevator, and thinking of what to do for another strip.
Down dooby do down down
Am I the only one here who knows they’d think that was interesting if it was pointed out to them in real life?
belated comment prompted by a friend going through the archives
Howard is making small-talk and Joe, for whatever reason, couldn’t find the energy to be physically or emotionally abusive. Maybe deflating Joyce and bringing her to tears filled his quota for the day.
There’s something kind of…sad, I guess, about Howard’s constant attempts to hang out with Joe. I mean, it’s not like there’s no one else in the dorm, or he couldn’t meet people at class. He’s too outgoing to be suffering from the sort of social issues that would make latching himself on to his next-door neighbor inherently the most appealing option. And if nothing else I’m sure the RA would be happy to hang out with him.
I mean, I’m sure he lost a lot of friends after the Mulgrew incident, and the school paper might’ve made him a sort of social pariah, but his attempts to hang out with Joe started before that. And Joe, being a year or so off from his eventual redemption arc, mostly responds by at best putting on a thin veneer of abusive friendliness and at worst with actual physical harm. Does Howard think this is just how guys hang out? Is he, like Joyce, incapable of believing someone doesn’t like him until directly confronted with the possibility?
None of these are likely, really—he’s clearheaded enough about where he stands with Joe to complain to his sister, after all, and he’s smart enough to fear whatever manner of beast he’s been forced to share a room with. Is Howard some sort of masochist? Is that it?
I’ve given this way too much thought.
No, that’s about the right amount of thought for a geek.
My answer is simple: Howard is a COMPLETE idiot.
Originally posted:
December 7, 1998