(Strip Number 4002, Original Date of Publication, 8 May 1981)
Panel 1: We start the proceedings watching Mike coming into the living room in a bit of a panic; he tells Elly, who's sewing something or other, "Mom!! Me an'Lawrence was goin'...." Elly, who has her eyes closed, says "Lawrence and I were going...."
Panel 2: Since Mike hasn't been corrupted into thinking that how one says something is more important than what is being said yet, he continues on with the grammar he's familiar with; that means that when he says "Yah....Anyhow, we seen...." only to be immediately corrected and reminded that "We SAW...."
Panel 3: Since he's more interested in explaining what happened than how he says it, he next says "Well, you know them guys who..."; since Elly is more interested in how things are being said than what's being said, she snippily states "Those guys; watch your speech, Michael."
Panel 4: Now that she's put her sewing away, she asks him what he wanted to tell her; since she bewildered, belittled and confused him, he's forgotten.
Summary: The moral, as Lynn sees it, is that if Michael had spoken proper English from the get-go, all would have been well; it was his insistence on using bad English that led to the non-joke. The problem, of course, is that Lynn's premise is so much junk; if Elly hadn't interrupted and corrected him because she was more interested in how things were being said than what was being discussed, she would have learned what the disaster was. "Them two guys" might have, for instance, dropped the N-bomb on Lawrence, stolen his lunch money, called Connie a roadside hands-on gig or any damned thing; Elly never knew what happened because she was too busy trying to ram a stick up Mike's ass.
Also, it's always good for a laugh that a woman who speaks and writes coarse, barbarous, poorly-punctuated and misspelled English and who loads the page with tripe like spuds, duds, the biff and sleeps presumes to lecture us on our grammar.