Sunday, October 23rd 2016: Doghouse In Your Soul

Ladies and Gentlemen!
Come one, come all
To view The Doghouse in your Soul!

Doghouse In Your Soul is created by Josh and Katherine Raimonde. Let's join Meshack, Chinmey and the crew at Mondo's pet store for a few laughs.

The Ratings

The jokes are flat

The Raves

Of all the comics in Doghouse, I enjoyed this one, mostly because it's the kind of humor I do like:

Poor Alaska, but you taste so good with butter.

I admittedly like this one because it's a video game reference:

And since it's an election year:

I thought some of the other pet related jokes were amusing, but most of the jokes fell flat for me. The about page mentions that the strips contain a bit of social commentary, references to pop culture, "but deep down has a lot of heart as it’s coming from a pet lover and a new dad." Congratulations on the baby!

But, that's when it hit me: they're dad jokes.

They're harmless, they're punny at times, and when their child grows up aside from having two lovable, artistic parents, that child is going to enjoy the best dad jokes. I say that respectfully because when/if I ever have a child, they too will suffer from my dad jokes.

The Razzes

I felt that the jokes were scattershot though. One would be about Game of Thrones. The next Donald Trump. Then a "cats hate water" joke. Some jokes felt like obvious commentary like people sneezing into a buffet table and kids touching and grabbing everything (which BTW, is totally true). 

I also kept thinking: why these characters and these commentaries? Do they really go together? Chimney being a dopey dog worked for me, but I think we tend to characterize dogs in that vein. It's a "stupid, yet lovable" trope -- think back to Odie from Garfield or more recently the dog from Up. Meshack the skunk seemed to be fairly central to the comic, because he's more anthropomorphize and insightful on a human level, a la Brian from Family Guy. He sits in the arm chair and watches TV amd there's also the Meshack's Corner strips:

The animals taking on human commentary seems out of place. The one-off about Meshack and Jon Snow didn't really work for me. The jokes about the animals being animals, or at least vocalizing from their point-of-view I thought were more amusing. It's why I like the crab comic up above. To humans crabfest is an amazing dinner, but to a crab that is a horror show.

As I read the comics, I did have one technical issue with the Summer Olympics comic, and it was reading the order of the speech bubbles. Usually speech bubbles are arranged to read left to right, so I naturally read the top row of bubbles without considering the bubbles below it, and really they needed to somehow criss-cross each other or my instincts would mean I'd miss half the conversation.

Maybe this comic would be better served as a vertical one so we can get the left-to-right read on the conversation between Meshack and Chimney.  

The Revue

If you like animal humor, you may find some of the strips here amusing.