From American Cornball, by Christopher Miller:

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[Couches] are a little funny in themselves, maybe because they aren't chairs, and aren't nearly as common as chairs, but bear enough of a resemblance to seem like comically defective or grandiose chairs.

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When a cartoon is set on a desert island now--and this was already the case half a century ago--the first joke is that a cartoonist has dared to do it again.

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[Re. guest towels and related matters:] It could be argued that the sublimation of prosaic household objects into the poetry of uselessness is part of what makes a house a home, but so much the worse for homes.

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Hat takes are one of the most quintessentially cartoonish of all cartoon clichés, and I have the numbers to prove it, since I recently devised a pseudoscientific formula for determining the cartoonishness of any object, situation, or event: you divide its incidence in comic strips (scored on a scale of 1 to 10) by its incidence in real life.

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When McCay... finally gets his idea, it comes not in the form of a lightbulb but a living creature--a bird, presumably, since it has a beak and two webbed feet, and flies away the instant another cartoonist diverts McCay's attention. It looks less like a bird, though, than a flying porcupine; it looks, in fact, uncannily like the Thing I pictured the first time I read Emily Dickinson's line "Hope is the thing with feathers." We know it's a funny idea, as McCay wished for, because it's funny-looking.

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Caspar [Milquetoast] is so meek, he deserves to inherit the earth single-handedly.

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Lunch is a funnier word, but breakfast is the funnier meal....

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[Re. "phooey" and other such terms:] Or is it that we're so inundated with nonsense these days that we've lost our sensitivity to it, our inability to discriminate fine shades?

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The only place [a lucaflect] really makes sense is indoors, where a window might be the brightest source of light in a room, but great cartoonists are not afraid of nonsense, and have no qualms about lucaflecting outdoors too.

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If you imagine what Peanuts would have been like if Schulz had called it Placekicker Charlie and every strip had featured Charlie Brown’s attempts to kick that football and Lucy’s yanking it away, you’ve just imagined hundreds of early comic strips.