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Comedy Court, 26 February 2008

Memo to Chris Muir: TAKE THE STAND.

No, not "a" stand. I'm sure you think you take "a" stand every time you post one of your awful, ridiculous, "Day By Day" right-wing webcomics. Day By Day has two distinguishing characteristics. Three, if you count each of the breasts that figure prominently into almost every strip's artwork individually. It's second or third characteristic is incomprehensible right-wing ideology.

And I don't mean incomprehensible in the "how could anybody believe that" sense. I mean incomprehensible in the "Grover Norquist could work with the Mallard Fillmore guy for a week, and they still wouldn't be able to figure out Muir's point" kind of way.

Other worthy individuals have deconstructed the larger Day By Day body of work, but one recent installment is so awful, it calls for a special emergency session of Comedy Court.

THE DEFENDANT: Chris Muir.

THE JOKE: Michelle Obama is a Nazi!

THE DEFENSE: Muir appears to have no online presence other than the actual strips*, so judging from the work itself, the defense appears to be "It's not MY fault she sounds like a Nazi when you quote her."

THE VERDICT: Guilty, by reason of insanity.

Allow me to summarize the strip. Panel One is the setup. Titty Woman offers to perform an impression of Michelle Obama, "in her own words". Panel Two is the joke, featuring Titty Woman in a short-sleeve, low-cut Nazi uniform, Nazi salute with one hand, "I Have A Hitler Moustache" with the other. She recites some sentences, inside quote marks, in vaguely Teutonic lettering. Panel Three has Titty Woman asking, from off-screen, if she's fallen under Godwin's Law. Voice of Conservative Black America replies "Not with HER words", and Goatee-Like-The-Cartoonist's-Guy asks her to do it again.

As Exhibit A, I would like to introduce the text Titty Woman quotes as being Michelle Obama's words. In the interest of maintaining the decorum of Comedy Court, we will not shout out what time it is, but the time of the actual quote will be entered into the court record.

"Barack will require you to work... Barack never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, unt uniformed!"

Exhibit B, and I bet you know where this is going, is Michelle Obama's actual quote, from a speech at UCLA.

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Our guilty ruling is based on three factors. First, that the word "will" was left out between "Barack" and "never". Either this was done in an attempt to imitate a speech pattern that neither Nazis nor Michelle Obama exhibit, or the stupid motherfucker was just sloppy in a panel already overcrowded by a pair of oversized Nazi breasts. Either would be grounds for a summary judgment against the plaintiff and a minimum sentence of Wacom tablet and scanner confiscation.

Second, the removal of the "n" from "uninformed", turning it, like a misguided, retarded Gene Wilder, into "uniformed". Again, it's impossible to tell if it was intentional, like the replacing of "and" with "unt", or just the generic sloppiness of a lazy halfwit.

But most damning, in the Court's eyes, is Muir's complete and utter failure to MAKE HIS JOKE. Despite his clever use of an ellipsis to remove the context that explains Obama's statement, despite the removal of stray letters, names, and verbs to distance "her own words" even farther from her own words, Muir STILL doesn't manage to turn what Michelle Obama said into something a Nazi would say. I don't get it. Even out of context, there's nothing about invading Poland, exterminating the Jews, or having sex with Eva Braun.

Is it the "requirement to work" part? Because a "requirement to work" is something Republicans have been shoehorning into so-called welfare reform for over a decade. All that's left is not letting you go back to your lives as usual, which I suppose the Nazis were guilty of, but so were lots of other people. For fuck's sake, I couldn't go back to living my life as usual once I learned Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father, and that doesn't make James Earl Jones a Nazi.

The whole joke hinges on Michelle Obama saying something vaguely Nazey, and I'm sorry, but there's no Nazi there. It's a completely Hitler-free zone. I'd hate to suggest that Day By Day's author and audience get their dicks hard by looking at large-breasted women in Nazi uniforms, but I'm having a tough time discerning any other artistic point to the comic.

In addition, Comedy Court will be incurring the usual punitive damages for anybody caught using the phrase "Godwin's Law" wrong - a mandatory re-reading of one year's worth of Usenet postings from somewhere between 1993 and 1996. Harsh, but fair. And necessary as a deterrent. Every time you people get that shit wrong, my blood pressure spikes.

Chris Muir: one astonishingly unfunny son of a bitch. court adjourned.

*Seriously. The website appears to consist entirely of one small image of the comic, a navigation bar, and four thousand tiny ads that cannot possibly bring in enough money to get Muir to support tax cuts for the wealthy.