Blackwolff9: My apologies for impugning ignorance. If I had heard you speak instead of reading it, I would have got the inflection. It's a clever gag, but maybe would have been better in this case if they had been speaking for two or three frames before she commented. The only sin that Darrin Bell commits is trying to put too many gags into each strip.

Ottodesu: It was not my intention to insult anyone's language skills. It just seemed to me that the joke hinged upon a 3-way language barrier much like the West Wing episode you described. When you read it initially, it kinda gets past you and then the light bulb goes off and you say to yourself, "Wait a minute! She's speaking English!" I'm only referring to the type of off-the-wall joke that could happen in the context of the comic. Joke's still funny,but you have to stop and think about what's going on in the strip.

If I could edit, I would refer to the episode of West Wing, where the staffers were trying to get to speak to an Indonesian Minister who was from an obscure region. They could only find a translator who could speak English and another dialect. Then they found another who could translate from that dialect into the dialect of the official. Very funny to watch, especially when the Minister finally had enough and addressed the staffers in college standard English. I was living in Indonesia at the time, and I was laughing and cringing at the same time.

Darrin! Only in your world could Lemont find the one person on the streets of Tehran who just happens to speak perfect English! How does that happen?

I worked for a newspaper up until this year and lays offs hit. This cracked me up because it would have bee so like the paper I worked for to hire the wrong language translator. Once sent a couple of reporters to Italy a few years back and pretty much left them to fend for theirselves( and pay for a most of it)