Wrong caption I'm sittin there in the cafeteria today eating some godforsaken corporate salad, and I come across today's installment of that old creaky standby, Mother Goose & Grimm, a comic apparently about an old goose and her dog, except when it is in random service of a play on words, and features neither Mother Goose nor Grimm.

So I read this caption and immediately sensed that something was off. Would this not have been funnier (well, relative to the world of MG&G) had the caption been "Careful, these plates are *hot*?" What's with the cold? That's just crappy punchline writing, is what that is. I mean, I see that he is going for this broad sort of "things are different in Hell" approach, the old "Ha ha this is the opposite of what it actually should be" trope upon which comic dinosaurs perpetually lean, but had the plates been hot, this would have actually elevated the punchline from "opposite" to "irony," which should be a concept covered in Syndicated Comic Dinosaurs 101.

Someone fire this guy. Oh wait-- Once you are syndicated in the paper, you apparently have tenure beyond even the grave, so never mind*.

*Although allow me to add that in using the example of Charles Schultz, I mean no disrespect, since although his later life comics seemed to revolve around school children spending a lot of time on the golf course, he is one of the great comic writers of all time, and probably deserves his post-lifetime pass.  ¶ 11:47 AM