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Home Remedies

|< < Prev #3217 (March 9, 2026)

Title text: As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

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Explanation

Many household problems have a range of commonly-circulated supposed solutions using easily available items and ingredients, such as using salt to lift a stain out of a carpet. Sometimes, when one of these problems presents itself, several competing remedies may be offered by those present. This comic imagines this as a competitive sport, in which the final test is to combine several of these problems into one grand challenge to be solved. Specifically, the contestants in this case are presented with:

• removing unpleasant odours (in this case, that of a skunk)
• curing a hangover
• removing chewing gum stuck in hair

and possibly

• removing a wild animal from the premises

The contest appears to be set up such that strategy plays a role. While a hungover skunk is highly likely to spray when chewing gum is being removed from its fur (thus forcing the contestant to fix all 3 problems), a hangover cure that makes use of a restorative deep sleep could, if administered properly, completely remove the need to remedy the smell of skunk spray. Offering contestants a longer yet easier path versus a quicker yet riskier path is a common trope in reality television. Putting the skunk to sleep could be seen as risky due to the complexity of the remedy, the risk of disqualification (killing the skunk) and the risk of failure (getting sprayed anyway, not actually curing the hangover, or running out of time). White Hat may be at an unfair advantage in implementing a strategy that prevents the skunk from spraying since the other two contestants' boxes are vibrating, indicating their skunks are agitated and thus liable to spray as soon as the box is opened, and his is not.

The title text's requirement that any assistance must come from a grandparent may reference the fact that such treatments are often described as "something my (granpappy/grandmaw/etc) told me", perhaps having reportedly been something that they themselves learnt from their own grandparent (and possibly even further back), deferring to the implied authority and experience behind them. These tidbits of information are rarely used enough to be among any of the life lessons that direct parents may teach to an individual, but still useful knowledge to pass down the generations.

Other people, not so emotionally invested in the ramblings of someone else's grandparent, may be more skeptically considering such 'advice' as more of an old wives' tale that isn't being passed on (or even remembered) entirely reliably, but then this is at least partly what the featured competition seems to be testing, and presumably those who have reached this final stage have already proven themselves as being more aptly critical than most of the various home remedies that they've potentially been told by their various (especially more elder) family members.

Transcript

[Cueball, holding a microphone, is addressing 3 contestants (Megan, White Hat & Hairbun), each standing at desks. Each desk has a lidded box on top and two drawers below. Megan and Hairbun's boxes are shaking, with their lids slightly open, due to containing (while not seen in the image) skunks.]

Cueball: And now, for the final round, you have each been given a skunk with a hangover and chewing gum stuck to its fur.

Cueball: You have 30 minutes. Good luck.

[Caption below the image:]

The Home Remedy World Championships

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