Do andmoids dream of electric Shemp? – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 29

Poor Professor – having to fall asleep as soon as possible is putting a lot of pressure on a person his age. Especially since he just got up, practically. And especially especially since he didn’t get any breakfast after getting up – and grumpiness doesn’t make somebody fall asleep any faster.

Fortunately, the Professor remember an old trick from his childhood: counting Shemp! Yeah, I know…normally it’s “counting sheep“. But the Professor’s mom had a slight speech impediment, so this old family tradition got handed down to him in a slightly modified format. But hey, it works for him, so what more do you want.

Although strictly speaking, you shouldn’t even be able to count Shemp, at least not for an extended period of time, since there was really only one Shemp…well, plus several fake Shemps, if you count those…I mean if you count them for the purpose of counting, not if you count them per se…unless you count them, of course, then you can count them.

But no matter how many Shemps there were, fake or real, they were definitely all in black and white (probably not in real life, but in all of their screen appearances). The idea that there was a blue Shemp and a red Shemp are mistaken – it’s just something the Professor’s memory wrongly constructed from a Dr. Seuss book and an incident when he mistakenly wore a set of 3D-glasses to a Three Stooges matinee.

At least it worked, and the Professor finally got his prescient dreaming done – and now Dr. Dutchman Fu’s plan is revealed and crystal clear!

Well, save for some embellishments that come naturally from the medium of dreams, of course. You might notice that the Professor himself also appears slightly embellished in the last panel…well, he tends to dream himself as looking the way he used to look when he was younger. And his memory might have wrongly reconstructed an aspect or two of that, as well. ._.

More on Monday.

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