A curious case of repetition

Writing a daily comic strip has to be one of the hardest things to do in the creative arts. Having to come up with a good and original joke every single day is something I cannot imagine doing, assuming that I can come up with any jokes at all, which I can’t. Cartoonists often fall back on familiar tropes such as people stuck on a desert island or the Garden of Eden or the fortune teller with a crystal ball and the repetition of such tropes is seen as fair game as long as the joke is slightly different. Some cartoonists have their own particular tropes that they fall back upon.
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On holding everyone responsible for the actions of a few

The odious Rupert Murdoch has weighed in with a series of tweets that all Muslims are essentially responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killers, and author J. K. Rowling and others have responded ridiculing him. Jon Stewart and a panel of The Daily Show correspondents used the Murdoch episode as a springboard to discuss the double standard of those like Murdoch who demand that all Muslims denounce all acts of violence by any Muslim anywhere.
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How many days are there in a week?

Believe it or not, the answer to this question became the subject of a very heated exchange on a site devoted to fans of bodybuilding. Like all great philosophical debates it all stemmed from asking, as Socrates so often did to provoke deep thought among his pupils, a simple question that you might have felt had a straightforward answer. In this case, the question was: If you exercise every other day, how many days a week are you doing it?

The argument raged on and on and is quite hilarious.

Follow Peanuts from the beginning

The Peanuts comic strip started on October 12, 1950. It was considered groundbreaking because for the first time it had little children who were not lovable scamps but, as we see from the very first cartoon below, also expressed emotions like meanness and anger and even hate that people were used to seeing expressed mostly by adults. That this caused some controversy seems surprising these days when we live in an era of South Park.
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What have the shootings in Paris got to do with cows?

Satirical programs like The Daily Show that use news headlines as their raw material have difficulty dealing with tragedies like the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. How can they treat such events with humor without being perceived as grossly insensitive? On the other hand, the victims were in the same line of work as them and so they cannot blithely ignore a story that cuts so closely to home.
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The collapsing health care system

The journalist Steven Brill appeared on the program Fresh Air to talk about why the US health system. He said it is unsustainable and heading for a crash because there is no price control mechanism. He lays the blame squarely on the hospitals, drug companies who are allowed to price-gouge, and medical device manufacturers, all of whom rake in huge profits that enable them to pay their top executives high profits.
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The role of satire in politics

It is a source of increasing concern to the establishment media that younger people are tuning in to comedy shows like The Daily Show that skewer the supposedly serious news shows and not tuning in to them, causing the demographic of their viewers to steadily inch upwards and well into retirement ages. This has naturally discomfited the people who host those shows and caused some of them to argue that this satirical attitude is making younger people more cynical about the political system and the media.
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Salmon cannon

It is well known that salmon return to their old spawning grounds, a journey that requires an arduous journey upstream, and that they somehow manage to overcome the huge hurdles involved. But what happens when human beings build dams that put that goal out of reach for even the most intrepid fish?

John Oliver says that some people are resorting to technology to help the salmon out.
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