This one I found not because I was diligently auditing the dialog (I was, in fact, distracting myself from a rather boring conference call), but because the dialog itself didn’t make immediate sense to me and my brain screeched to a halt. The joke was lost on me, and having read every strip multiple times over decades, I’m familiar with Watterson’s humor. It was enough to not slip past me:
November 25, 1988
A second read and it became obvious that this editorial change was much bigger. I would even go so far as to say it changes the entire joke. Here’s my take, paraphrasing and reading between the lines:
Original version:
Calvin: I’m a cranky kid.
Mom: I don’t care.
Calvin: If you were truly the woman who gave birth to me, you would care a lot more than you do.
Mom: If I weren’t truly the woman who gave birth to you, then I wouldn’t have kept you this long.
Calvin: I still don’t believe you’re the woman who gave birth to me. You purchased me.
Revised version:
Calvin: I’m a cranky kid.
Mom: I don’t care.
Calvin: If you were qualified to be a mother in the first place, you would care a lot more than you do.
Mom: If I weren’t qualified to be a mother, then I wouldn’t have kept you this long.
Calvin: I still don’t believe you’re qualified to be a mother. I want to see documentation that you’re certified to be one.
It’s sort of a similar punchline, but a pretty significant change. It’s modernizing the joke (as in, our growing obsession with professional certifications). As I previously mentioned in…
…kids and families often “joked” about the inherent “legitimacy” of children. In fact, that’s still done today in biological nuclear families with much frequency. But again, the editors must have considered that insensitive to adopted children/broken families/divorced families/remarried families and whatever any other form of non-traditional families out there that they preferred to update the text.
And again, I’ll accuse them of trying to edit history by changing art to be more palatable to a new audience.
–Simon