Strike Three?

You all know I am a fan of the comics. Well, certain comics. I keep my complaints about the general suckitude of today's comics to myself, but I had to get your feedback on this one.

Normally the comic B.C. is not funny. It hasn't been funny since...well, I've been assured that it was once quite revolutionary. At least when Hart was still drawing it, you could see how a comic might make sense, if you were a deranged, right-wing, public-school hating Christian that believed that the Jews had never properly paid for killing Jesus.

But since Hart died, nothing in that comic makes sense. I offer today's comic as an example:

In panel one, we have a batter being distracted by the blimp. Which could set up the "punchline" that follows if the batter was called out or something because he wasn't paying attention. Except, the pitch coming at the batter is clearly a ball. Except, except, I think that panel two is supposed to indicate that the batter was actually beaned by the pitch, which should mean that the batter takes a base.

Now the "joke" in panel two is, I think, supposed to be that the coach's team is so bad, as indicated by the scoreboard, that he can only think something along the lines of "Why me?" (I would also accept "Good grief," "Bumstead!," or "Ah, Ziggy, will you ever win?") The "joke" is "funny" because the lament "Why me?" is, here, rendered in terms of a famous saying, only bent to fit the particulars of this situation. Granted, bent in such a manner as to render it unintelligible.

Except (a lot of that today), being beaned by a pitch is a good thing. You take a base. Possibly the first one this team has taken today. Which means that a punchline along the lines of "Best play he's made all day!" wouldn't be necessarily "funny," but I'll bet any one a dollar that it's "funnier."

I expect that maybe this was the original idea behind the joke, except maybe the cartoonist thought that maybe we wouldn't "get" it, because you have to know the rules of baseball. So, instead, he decided to go with "makes no sense to any one."

Unless, and this just occurred to me while I was writing, the "joke" is that the batter made no attempt to get out of the way of the ball, so he doesn't get to take a base. So by looking at the blimp, he doesn't get to take the base and he got beaned for no reason. Which would be, in a word, hilarious.

Anyone got any better ideas about this, as a far as what "Mason" might have been thinking when he drew this?