Gallery: Toothpaste For Dinner

(via Slate) "It's hard (and unfunny) to pinpoint what's funny about [the webcomic] Toothpaste for Dinner. Like Rothko or Taoism, it generates cognitive complexity out of extreme simplicity. One of its favorite jokes is the modified cliche. The first strip I ever saw, for instance, the one that started all my clicking, shows a man declaring, 'If I had a dollar for every time I had sixty cents, I would be Canada.' The humor here comes from the mildly disorienting patchwork of logics: a cliche unexpectedly derailed by an exchange rate; the incompatibility between the first-person singular and a large nation; and the earnestness of the doodled man—his mouth wide open, head tilted seriously, arms thrust out like an impassioned muppet preacher."