Random Acts Of Silliness

Please Turn Off Your Seriousness

Cartoonists spend a lot of serious hours learning how to draw insanely. So much hard work goes into it. In fact, the more simple, crazy, and easy a piece looks the more likely that it’s backed by thousands of hours of education combined with unhealthy snacking.

Thousands of hours? To learn how to create something like Porky Pig? Yep. Did they have Cheetos back in the days when Porky was created? They did not. Those amazing pioneers created classic cartoon characters without the benefit of modern junk food. They only had alcohol and cigarettes. Let that sink in so you can admire those amazing pioneers even more than you already do.

To be a cartoonist, you have to learn how to draw. That’s the hard part. It doesn’t take forever, it just feels like it. Maybe 10,000 drawings or so. That’s to learn the basics. Then you have to keep it up the rest of your life and continue to learn. It’s similar to the effort required to become a doctor but without monetary reward or access to medication samples.

Next, you need to break the rules. Not all of them. Leave the ones that keep you grounded to Earth, like design principals, but break what you need to in order to give those drawings your signature look. It’s your own special form of handwriting.

Remember learning how to write? I do. I remember the the first word that we covered when I entered the public school system. The word was “red”. It was the prefect word for a red state public school system, but I knew nothing of that then. I only knew that a magical door was opening up. “The fools!” I thought. “Once I have deciphered their communication system I shall take over the world! Mwah-ha-haaaa!” The magical words led to a magical acceptance letter from an out of state college.

I never took over the world, as you know. I didn’t want to. Frankly, it looked like a lot of work. Somebody would have to be crazy to want to take over everything, and modern political figures demonstrate this daily, but I did want to mock it. Being silly is much more fun.

I’ve selected silly strips for some silly fun so we can discuss and laugh at the silliness at it all. Come. Be silly with me.

This is still the goal. If it weren’t for free concerts and art shows around me I’d really never go anywhere. Sure, I can go look at new things in stores, but buying things I don’t have to have is some sort of luxury vacation item.

This one probably amused me more than the readers. At the time I made this, I was working for a Justin. He was a very nice guy, and very hard working, but he seemed to come from a school of Justins that must have also been a school for game show hosts. It’s a weird connection but I swear it exists. The same can-do spirit that permeates young leadership professionals is the same kind of energy you see in a game show host. It’s not a bad thing, it just is. I was either working for Justin or Ryan Seacrest. I really couldn’t tell the difference.

If you don’t know, there are many jobs where the reward for learning new things is to be asked to do them without an increase in pay. If Berle has any redeemable traits, which is unlikely, it’s that he can sense unrewarded work a mile away.

Tabby is relaxing and holding her cat, Mr. Thompson, here. As my friend Jim pointed out, this is Mr. Thompson 4.0. Mr. Thompson has appeared in three other comics throughout my life. He ties together a little comic universe that nobody has read. Be happy you have not read the previous comics he has been in. Trust me. As noted above, you have to create quite a bit of work before you wind up with anything good.

This is an eternal truth. Don’t say how slow it is. Inevitably, when it’s busy, someone will also say that a lot of customers makes the day go by quickly. It might even be a customer who says it. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Life is precious, right? Why would I want it to go by quickly? Wishing for a lot of customers is wishing for a quick death.

Ah, now we’re into some supreme silliness. Berle got settlement money from the company at the conclusion of an early storyline. I would reveal what the storyline was, but then I’d be spoiling it for you and I’d have to go back and read it myself, as I don’t remember. Nevertheless, he spent his little windfall on a jet pack. The problem was that he couldn’t afford the fuel. It was so very Berle of him.

I worked at a Walmart in a very posh area of town for two weeks. I was laid off from a company and thought I’d get a little job to pay the bills while I looked for something else. Something else came along much more quickly than I thought, so it was with great embarrassment that I handed in my resignation at the Walmart deli so soon after starting. Well, the embarrassment wasn’t that great. It was little. Very little, now that I think about it. Maybe it was none. None whatsoever. Zero embarrassment. I just left. Poor Walmart. Now I’m embarrassed.

Anyway, they had the biggest unused breakroom I’d ever seen in my life. It could’ve been a Silicon Valley breakroom. Thinking about it, maybe I should’ve kept the deli job.

If a customer finds out that you’re a manager, no matter how low on the manager pecking order you may be, they might give you a million and three suggestions for changes. The fact that implementing said changes would require major decisions from higher ups a thousand miles away will be lost on them. Worldwide conglomerates aren’t known for individual, local tweaks to their cookie cutter system. Hopefully the company has an email address for such suggestions from customers. I’m sure there’s some AI bot thingy answering all emails now.

I may have posted this one before, but the theme today is silliness and this was one of my favorite silly comics. If there is something in the back that’s not on the shelf, there are plenty of workers who will be enthusiastic about finding it. Finding something that’s actually in the back is kind of like winning a little lottery. Everyone involved is enthused, and they should be. Whenever I’m with someone who gets an employee to check the back, I keep telling them that it’s never in the back. The door in this comic is really hitting me.

This was an early Tabby comic that I may have written when I accidentally bit the inside of my mouth. When you see a problem customer, the theme to Jaws may start to play in your head. I equated it with knowing that I’d bite the same spot in my mouth again. It was a very personal analogy that I inserted here. So silly.

I have known managers who eat with the staff that they supervise, but they’ve been atypical. I’ve known many more managers who never seem to eat at all. It’s very mysterious and silly.