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No. 555: The Name's the Game

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The Name's the Game

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=555

Strip by: January First-of-May

{Lucy and Charlie Brown are standing on the pitcher's mound during a baseball game}
Lucy: Look, I found a list of the players on the other team..
Lucy: {reading from the list} "Clay, Blake, Morgan, Travis, Trent, Hunter.."
Lucy: {reading from the list} "Bailey, Madison, Taylor and Justin"
Charlie Brown: Are those their first or last names?

The author writes:

It struck me as I read the original comic that I couldn't actually figure out if those were supposed to be first names or last names; for most of those I could think of a person with that last name more easily than (or, at least, nearly as easily as) of a person with that first name. (The exceptions were Justin, which is mostly a first name; Hunter, which is too strongly associated with Biden Jr.; and Travis, where I couldn't think of either.)

As it happens, it's only the last panel that provides the "first names" explanation; well, that and if they were last names there wouldn't have been much of a joke. But if we ignore the last panel, both first names and last names would fit the context fairly well. So it makes sense for Charlie to ask.

(Text mostly copy-pasted from elsewhere in the strip, though I had to copy the question mark from the previous day's strip, since this one didn't have one to copy.)

Original Peanuts strip: 1997-07-19.