I know there are about to be a dozen posts saying what's wrong withthis strip, but it gave me a much-needed giggle.

Thaanks.

The Eggcorn Forum. Just Google Eggcorn.

Those two neologism-jokes have been circulating (along with many far funnier ones) on the internet for years.

One week of recycling emailed office jokes seemed a bit strange. Two in a row makes me wonder if he's thumbing his nose at his readers. "Hey kids! I can make money no matter WHAT I draw!" In any case, I think it's the last straw--time for me to stop reading this strip.

It has been for some time now.

Uh, Broadsheet? Joan?

I think that one misses the point by looking for 100% new content. It can be argued, in fact, that there isn't any and may never be again. With writing, storytelling, comedy and any other entertainment, however, it isn't the originality of the core content, but rather of its delivery. Why do a ballet more than once if it has already been done? To see how some other gifted group of people interprets it! Granted, some performances are more entertaining than others, but even that is subjective. Watch the Aristocrats with a group of people and compare notes. Listen to the same jazz tune played by 10 different bands and do the same. Watch the 4 or 5 different iterations of a Hollywood movie, remade each generation for either or both artistic or financial reasons, and see if everyone enjoys the same one. Mr. Breathed always delivers well-drawn characters who have a flair for delivery. Just because you'd heard this one before doesn't mean that he can't tell it well enough to get you to laugh the second time. Nor does it mean that all of us have heard it before. At any rate, quit your whining and let the rest of us enjoy. Chuckles are way too few and far between as it is.

Hey, cut the guy some slack. Constantly recycling your own two-decade old comic strips is tough work, sometimes you need a break.

So what if next week's strip is just a bunch of cute kitten photos?

"Mr. Breathed always delivers well-drawn characters who have a flair for delivery."

Are you reading the same strip? He doesn't even bother drawing his characters as well as he did in the 80s, anymore. But if by "fair for delivery" you mean that at least one of them raises their fist and shouts in the middle panels of every single strip - can't argue there.

Is even vaguely inspiring anymore. It's just devolved into snarling pile of suck.

This must be the offices of Bitter, Snearing and Crabbe. How're those grapes today, boys? Sour enough for ya?

Dear Breatherd and readers,

So, you read week in and out Salon's OPUS then we have to read the mopey, uninteresting copy of your complaints.

Then you likely plug in your mp3 player and listen to the recycled ad naseum pop music syntax (wherein truly nothing has happened new since the Vienese School administered Extreme Unction upon most all harmonic iteration back in the other century).

Then you will pay for the cinema and overjoy over the trite and hackney'd treatments- happy end, get the girl,save mankind from boogeypersons- yet you reserve your bile for an ink penguin and the popliterate allusion of a Shaggy,New Mexican J. Joyce enthusiast.

I must agree with JustKristin and blech-ma- you complaining,cumpulsive OPUS readers are boring and hardly represent the OPUS readership-print and online.

I will bet you all just envy not having payed attention back in drawing class, way back when!

Recycle? 'sBeen goin' on since "The Yellolw Kid" and "Katzenjammer" in the comics and J.S.Bach,Rembrandt, Bob Dylan,Gershwin,Ellington, Warhol,W.M.Thackery and Charles Bukowski (amoung a host) in other art forms all along. What you poopoos lack is nuanced aprehension.

Your letters are a good example of repetative sameness.

Keep writing them anyway. They are so fun to skip over whilst I scan and scroll for the good bylines on most of the others.

You're kidding, right? You're complaining about the recycled puns when the story is about

1) Right wing hatemongers insisting that anyone against the pres'dint is a lacy, lying librul AND hates Christmas

2) And the self same fellows and gals will take it somewhere else, like the destruction of the "American" language, any day now, because any excuse to demonize is a good one

3) And that we mustn't lose our punny-good sense of humor about it, because that's human nature.

And that, gee, NO ONE has thrown a conniption about saying "Merry Christmas" since, say, we first heard the word "waterboarding" would be a clue to our worthy opponents that that ship has not just sailed, but sunk under a waterspout of misery, and to stop making shit up to be mad about, since there's already enough.

In fact, the only people wanting to destroy Christmas are the same fine people who insist that Christmas can only be about their Christ, their personal relationship with God, and their purist interpretation of what it should be. All others must be converted, and their leaders killed. Hmm. That sounds familiar. Something from the east, I think.

So. Stop with the sniping, already, and look at the deeper message. Comics aren't just for yucking at any more, and grief is no longer good. Sorry, Charlie Brown.

Hooray for Opus.

Why do singers do covers of favorite songs? It's recycling. Why go to a second baseball game? A ball gets tossed, hit, and caught. That second game is recycling.

Do oral office jokes capture the moment of Opus' "bon mots" line as well as Breathed's pen?

An Opus pun is a cover presentation; it's watching the Florda quarterback one day and the LSU the next.

I am Opus. Let me pun!

FlorIda. :-(

More than kicking Breathed in the nuts every Saturday night, I enjoy reading the letters of the unhinged who prattle on and on about the hidden meanings that they see in this piece-of-shit comic strip. It's their own Rorschach test.

Oooo, Steve Dallas represents the "Right wing hatemongers" according to neimon. Last week Dallas was doing a crossword on the crapper while cute little Opus was playing solitaire in the bathtub and there was a portrait of Hillary with a goofy expression hanging on the wall. This prompted one psych patient to interpret it as meaning: "Existentialism/post-modernism accosted in the bathroom by Mr. Social Dominance Orientation feeling angry and impotent."

It's kind of like the right wing nutters who see the Virgin Mary in a rust stain on a concrete wall. Only this is the left wing version of the same sad delusions.

But the hatred you pour out on me is invigorating and it says more about you than it does me. Salon thrives on reader mail. One person's complaint is another person's critique. You want to have your say, but you won't let me have mine.

The imbeciles who "giggle" when they read Berk's mediocre "late period" scribbling will really enjoy Bazooka Joe bubblegum cartoons. That's what Berk is down to now, plagiarizing sophomoric on line joke sites for material and drawing the same characters doing the same things over and over. Opus with shower cap and scrub brush doing something in the bathroom. Opus with straw skimmer and polka dot bow tie. Steve Dallas yelling with his cigarette shooting out of his mouth. Binkley and Opus in the meadow under a tree. Binkley and Opus on a star-lit night. Lola Granola, Steve's clueless trend-follower girlfriend always looking ridiculous. Over and fucking over and fucking over again.

Then there's the outright theft of other cartoonists' gags. This is no "homage" to those artists as some of you claim, this is stealing. Theft, plagiarism and recycling. That's Opus.

OK, your turn. Bite me!