Hilarious In Hindsight / Comic Strips

• In a Dilbert strip from early 1992, Dogbert announces his intention to run for president, "hoping [his] charisma will unify a divided political party" - not the Democrats, but the Communists, as he wants to have a chance. A few years after Bill Clinton won the election, Scott Adams wrote in a compilation, "This joke made sense in 1992. Trust me."
• In a Bloom County Sunday strip, Steve Dallas has a fantasy of dancing around as Michael Jackson. Of course it was cool and badass in 1986...
  • Also in Bloom County, a Star Wars parody arc ended with this. Mind you, this strip is from 1983.
    • In the collected volume, Breathed comments "I was off one year. Funny thing looking back is that George apparently did lose his head."
  • One of the final Sunday strips had Donald Trump in Bill the Cat's body say that "Trump: The Strip" would be the same as Bloom County, "Except for the characters. I've fired them all."
  • In this 1981 strip Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is race and height swapped and retitled as Pitch Black and the Seven Big Honkies. In 2024 Disney 's remake of the film, Snow White is played by Latina actress Rachel Zegler and the dwarves are removed due to "ableism".
  • In 1984, the National Radical Meadow Party convention was shown on MTV. Opus was shown giving his speech but they were playing Heavy Metal music over it. This was in The '80s, when MTV only played music videos. In 1992, MTV started the "Choose or Lose" campaign.
• In the lead-up to the release of The Phantom Menace, FoxTrot had a strip about Jason posting fake news about the movie in order to convince other fans not to see the movie, allowing Jason a better chance to get tickets on opening day. One of the rumors he posted concerned how all CGI effects had been removed from the film, and as such Jar-Jar Binks had been renamed "Jar-Jar Binks, master of invisibility." Considering the eventual fan reaction, Peter's comment about why Jason's plan won't work is made a bit funnier. ^note Word of God even acknowledges the unintentional humor in his Best of Foxtrot collection.
  • Not to mention that the whole strip seems eerily like it could be a parody of notorious Fanon website SuperShadow.com.
  • In another strip, Jason made a violent video game, but it could also be played in a hyper-sanitized mode to avoid parental backlash. ("Your flower is spurting butterflies from its chest wound.") Then, Serious Sam HD comes, with Super Happy Funtime mode.
  • In one strip from June 1988, Peter calls a woman on the phone, who thinks he's someone named "Steve", causing Peter to ask who Steve is. Four months later, we meet Peter's best friend, named Steve.
  • One strip had Andy cutting the family's cable and the children are forced to watch Sesame Street instead. In January 2016, Sesame Street itself moved to cable channel HBO.
• A Pearls Before Swine strip showed Rat writing about a fake interview with Saddam Hussein who was found in a spider hole, playing a Game Boy. As Stephan Pastis wrote in commentary, Saddam Hussein was found in a spider hole, but not playing a Game Boy.
  • Similarly, one Story Arc involved Osama bin Laden living with the cast of The Family Circus. Later, it turned out that bin Laden was, indeed, hiding in plain sight.
  • In a strip from an arc where Pig had Newt Gingrich as a pet, Rat said that Newt can never be president and John McCain is a lock for 2008. He was proven right about the former, considering Newt's dropout of the 2012 election, but wrong about the latter, considering the other nominee won that election.
• Re-runs of the For Better or for Worse comic strip featuring Lawrence are funnier when you realize that Lawrence is gay. Like when he teases Michael for liking girls, when the boys take turns pulling each others' uvulae (it's that hangy thing in the back of your throat) or when teen Michael tries to comfort a dateless loser friend by pointing out Lawrence doesn't date either.
• Peanuts:
  • Charlie Brown repeatedly used the term "goat" to mean "failure", particularly when it came to sports. He once dropped a fly ball in the bottom of the ninth that cost his team the championship, and lamented "I could have been the hero... instead, I'm the goat!" This may have been a common expression back then, but calling a sports player "the GOAT" nowadays means the exact opposite.
  • One strip had Snoopy try to get Schroeder to recommend him for "Neighborhood Dog Of The Year". Schroeder said that Snoopy never said anything good about Beethoven. Snoopy then thinks that he didn't know Beethoven wanted to be "Neighborhood Dog Of The Year". 20 years later, a film series was made about a dog named Beethoven.
  • This strip. Let's just say that Tiger Woods now has a lot of experience "working with hoes".
  • One strip had Snoopy writing something titled "A Sad Story". Lucy calls it dumb, which is a frequent complaint levied against a fanfiction by that same title.
  • One strip has Linus mention to Charlie Brown that when Sally grows up, there will be three Major Leagues. In 2001, Major League Lacrosse joined Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer as sports leagues under the label, Major League. Let's also not forget the film franchise of the same name.
    • Linus' comment in context clearly is meant to refer to a third baseball league in addition to the American and National leagues ... this hasn't happened (yet), although the topic of additional major leagues was a topic of discussion around the time the comic was published, resulting in the existing ones adding more teams, and today the majors have nearly twice as many teams as they did then. Very few people in the US cared much about soccer or lacrosse in 2001, and when the strip was originally published, it's not much of an exaggeration to say no one did.
    • To be completely fair though, there's now a decent amount of baseball leagues although mostly regional, like the Frontier League, Atlantic League, Pioneer League, and the American Association of Professional Baseball.
• In one Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip, Calvin is out shopping with his mother and tries on some sunglasses while Hobbes watches. It's pretty funny on its own, but after Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann made its debut, it was noticed that the pair he settles on before his mom sends him back just happens to be green Kamina shades.
  • The script styling of the Calvinverse makes one strip, which chronicled Calvin discussing how they could become cultural icons on television, much more amusing.
    • Likewise, a series involving Calvin using a piece of cardboard to pretend he's on TV ends up even more amusing - particularly the one where Calvin plugs his beloved Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, in light of the fic's tendency to Product Place.
    • What's more, a throwaway gag from one New Year's strip has Hobbes asking Calvin if their parents celebrate the new year. Calvin notes that their idea of a party is "mixing regular coffee in with the decaf." Then there's the Calvin & Hobbes: The Series episode "New Year, New Disasters", which has Calvin invited to a New Year's party, while Calvin's parents drown their sorrows in cider.
  • In one winter strip, Calvin walks out a message asking jets pilots who can see it to do a barrel roll, several years before Star Fox 64 came out.
• Garfield:
  • Any pre-2006 strip involving Liz is especially funny to read nowadays, considering Jon and Liz are a couple now.
  • There was one 1982 strip where Garfield said that Monday moves in a mysterious way.
  • In one strip from the 90s, Garfield takes a bunch of pictures of Pookie and Odie with Jon's camera and denies that he took them. As "proof," one of the pictures has Garfield with Pookie and Odie while clearly holding the camera himself, in the style of today's "selfie."
  • There are a couple of early strips which feature Garfield walking on two feet until Jon tells him that cats don't do that.
  • Garfield and Friends has re-runs on Nickelodeon back in the mid-90's, and in late 2019, Viacom adquired the rights to the IP.
• Each collection of U.S. Acres, another Jim Davis comic strip, features an extra page at the beginning of each book. In the second book, "U.S. Acres Counts Its Chickens", this page was "Ole Sayings We Know Well", featuring plays on sayings about farm animals. One of them was "A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing", which showed a wolf whom looked exactly like the wolf from Season 5 of U.S. Acres, which would debut 3 years after the book was published. Another expression was "A Pig In A Poke", and showed Roy Rooster poking Orson in the stomach, making him look angered. 17 years after the book was published, this U.S. Acres fanart was published, which is exactly similar, but with the TV-exclusive character Aloysius poking Orson.
  • In one comic, Orson read a story to the chicks about a murderer. A year later, the first episode of U.S. Acres, "Wanted: Wade!" aired, and he was possibly reading the same book, as the book he was reading was about a criminal.
• In an early Get Fuzzy strip, Bucky doctored one of Satchel's Where's Waldo? books by changing it to Where's Osama?. At the end, a bunch of American troops find him, and presumably kill him, prompting Rob to say "you can't sell this to kids". In 2011...
• There's an issue of Twisted Toyfare Theatre about Wolverine's busy day-to-day schedule, wherein he guest stars in several comics over the course of the day. At the end, Alan Moore pops in to quote Oscar Wilde, saying the only thing worse than being talking about is not being talked about. Cut to Speedball, sullenly waiting by the phone, hoping he'll get a call from the Marvel Team Up guys. Speedball's next major appearance was in the last arc of Marvel Team-Up — and not long after he became thrust into the spotlight as Penance in the wake of Civil War (2006).
  • A related TTT gag features the strip "rebooted" and the closing line with Mego Spidey saying "Yeah, like this magazine will last another ninety issues." He turned out to be right.
• The Far Side once showed a strip of a cowboy being chased by UFOs titled "The often romanticized image of cowboys and aliens". In 2011, Cowboys & Aliens debuted, leading to many jokes about movie being an adaptation of The Far Side comic (it is a comic adaptation, just not of The Far Side).
  • There was also a strip of a man with cow heads growing out of his body being told by a doctor "I'm afraid you have cows." A few years later, so did some other folks...
  • One strip titled "Hopeful Parents" has a mom and dad watch their video game-obsessed kid and dream of future job advertisements for a person highly talented at video games. Decades later, eSports, Let's Play, YouTube and Twitch streamers, and various other gaming-related ventures have become financially viable, and many people have turned their aptitude for video games into a career.
• The Lockhorns: Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn's doctor is called Dr. H. Blog. And to think that "blog" would eventually become an actual word in the English language... (Would have been even better if his name was Dr. H. S. A. Blog.)
• This Close to Home strip from 1997. Two years later, Disney debuted the next-best thing but at no cost to park guests: Fastpass.
• Political Cartoons
  • Mike Peters has often mocked the Religious Right's views on marriage by having them be upset at Beauty and the Beast. For one example, here◊ is a Mother Goose and Grimm strip from 1995. Here◊ is an editorial cartoon from 2012. Of course, when Beauty and the Beast (2017) came out, there were actual criticisms from conservatives about LeFou being gay.
  • One British editorial cartoonist drew a Dalek that swapped its Catchphrase with "You are the Weakest Link...Goodbye." A few years later, Daleks would wind up encountering Anne Robinson...sort of.
  • A 1961 Herblock cartoon opposing increased wiretapping by law enforcement depicts a politician releasing an animal from a cage, with a policeman's cap on it. The animal in question? A Black Panther◊, which would later be the symbol of the Black Panther Party, which would be extensively wiretapped and spied on.
• In 2006, Billy of Cow And Boy started writing a horror movie screenplay, combining two of the scariest things he could think of, resuling in Tornado Sharks. Seven years later, the comic had entered reruns, and the Tornado Sharks strips reran a few months after the first Sharknado movie.
• My Cage stars a sky-blue playpus-man. In 2020, it was discovered that real platypuses—which are normally a boring shade of brown—glow teal under UV light.

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