Frog Applause by Teresa Burritt for April 11, 2022

That sheet is cinching her tighter than plastic wrap on Dexter’s table.

Is Teresa playing with fire?

I knew that there was an important reason to go to the dentist.

Pass the plate to prevent fiery deaths. Smokey’s Bear or get bare with you Lynn.

…only in perpetual reruns…

…but we would never wish Mz. Burritt such a terrible death…

…{unless she was a phoenix, perhaps…

…maybe}…

…which twin has the Tony?…

…[hint: it isn’t the one with a Lynn]…

…Tony must be reading Walt Whitman…

…because if he were reading, ‘The Best of Frog Applause,’…

…he wouldn’t be talking to his sister like that…

…that is one crazy lamp…

…throwing shade like that…

…I don’t know if my death will be fiery …

…but I hope my after-death isnt…

…the idea of landing in non sequitur instead of FA heaven does not appeal to me…

Where can I get some of that wallpaper? I’ve got a bad case of “dust ruffle” envy.

Military bedmaking was an art form. I learned that in my early years….and continue to this day….

Nip here, tuck there.. the tighter the better….and when the beds came together, it was a playground…..

Gee, I wonder what ‘Ghost Story Nights’ are like around their house. I bet those twins are snuggled up pretty close.

You gotta love their Cupid playing soccer lamp. Gooooooaaaaalllll!!!

QUICK, turn down the visible audio of that wallpaper, you hear me …? Read my lips …!

You could have a legacy comic that is continued by other cartoonists! (Unsure if you’d like that.) But no fiery deaths, please.

Jeepers… I’d keep a close eye on Lynn. Too much detail in that question.

“Talk speculatively to me, baby!”

Fiery death. Oh yeah, probably over love! That’s dramatic. More likely getting tangled in a collapsable ironing board, lol.

I can’t imagine a more painful and gruesome death. I read about people who “died peacefully in their sleep.” How does anyone know it ws peaceful. That person could have been having a nightmare of dying a fiery death while asleep. I suppose it makes loved ones feel better that Grandpa Ed died “peacefully.”

Once upon a time, back in The ‘30s and The ’40s, The Hays Code foisted very harsh censorship rules upon American filmmakers by the Moral Guardians. (The Hays Office was actually created by the studios themselves, in part, because they feared that actual government censorship would be the result of failing to rein things in.) One of the “do nots” that weren’t to be shown in films under any circumstances was “Any licentious or suggestive nudity.” Further down, in what was described as the “be careful” section, was “Man and woman in bed together.”The result was this trope: couples of any type were never shown in the same bed together, even if the work in question featured them as married and having children. If couples were shown in a bedroom at all, they were consigned to a pair of twin beds, usually with a nightstand in between so you didn’t imagine them ever pushing the beds together when we weren’t watching. Exactly where all those onscreen kids came from was not a question you were supposed to ask. In less censored media from the same era, twin beds were generally used to imply Sexless Marriages, and couples whose marriages were not believed to be lawful might find their sleeping accommodations unhappily altered.A curious variation appeared where the couple in question was actually shown as owning a bed big enough for two people. In such cases, they would never be lying down in the bed on-screen at the same time. The most “risqué” thing usually seen on-screen was one of them lying down and the other sitting on the edge of the bed. It can be gleaned from this that, in the eyes of the censors at the time, the unwritten rule was apparently that the line between a perfectly innocent talk in the bedroom and a prelude to steamy sexual activity was whether or not someone kept at least one foot off the bed and firmly on the ground at all times.

Although (as noted above) it wasn’t strictly forbidden to show men and women in bed together, it almost never happened in practice after 1934. This trope carried over to television in the 1950s and remained in effect until censorship standards loosened and The Hays Code became a dead letter in the 1960s, replaced by the MPAA ratings system for films and FCC censorship for television. The first live-action TV couple to share a bed on television, who were not already married in real life, were Darrin and Samantha Stephens on Bewitched. By the early ‘70s, the trope had been discarded entirely on such series as The Brady Bunch and The Bob Newhart Show.While mostly a Dead Horse Trope now, it might crop up from time to time in parody. It might also be used as a shorthand indicator that a married couple’s relationship is in trouble. Nowadays, if a couple is depicted as doing this, it represents that they have a very distant or antagonistic relationship. Or they may have other reasons for not sharing a bed like incompatible sleep, though having a different room is just as common for this. A reversal of this trope occurs when the characters aren’t in a romantic relationship but There Is Only One Bed. Not related to Exiled to the Couch.

What a weird time that must have been. People were expected to live a “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best” like except their lives on TV were flawed, faked, denied. We might have swung in the opposite direction now, but at least it’s not “morally censored” anymore.

“Some will die in hot pursuit in fiery auto crashes.”

If’n the couple joiners came together for utopia reasons. The ghostly sheets were mashed together. Then you would call Ghostbusters.

All of Mission Impossible burnt tape recordings may be bluffing Teresa’s Death.

The comic strips are going twilight zone.

Golly jeepers, fans of flaming fiery death scenarios! Maybe Guy and Lynn should “get together” so that he can squelch her morbid fantasies.

Sister lives!