Cave Sex Battles

Bizarro is brought to you today by Grammar.

I’m a self-proclaimed amateur expert on human behavior and anthropology and was pondering one day about how women tend to be more verbal than men. It then occurred to me that it would not surprise me in the least to find that females attained speech long before men, which is the point of this cartoon. It now occurs to me that an alternate interpretation of this cartoon is that both sexes had speech but it was hundreds of years before men actually started using it. That wouldn’t surprise me, either. Though most of my cartoons are not autobiographical, this one almost is. I’m not the traditionally silent type and probably talk far too much for my own good, but I was once married to a woman who could not stop talking if you had sewn her mouth shut. She woke up rambling on and on and it continued until after I fell asleep at night. It was disturbing, and not just to my sleep. (For a color print of this comic, go here.)

BIZARCHAEOLOGY: For dessert, I offer this elderly cartoon from 1998, in which I further explore stereotypes about male and female behavior as they may have pertained to prehistory. Yes, I know that not all men love football and TV and not all women love to shop. But humor is often found in generalizations and I don’t personally see anything insulting about either of these behaviors, so here it is. You may also notice that this cartoon situation took place in the early stages of language, before letters had been completely standardized and prepositions had been invented, but not before proper punctuation or capitalization.