John’s Joke

I think the big joke was supposed to be kind of like when someone deliberately lies about something to get them so upset they have to check and see if you are lying. Then when they find out the person was lying, they get to laugh that they got you upset in the first place over something that should have been an obvious lie. That is certainly the way this sequence plays out with today’s For Better or For Worse reprint. It something akin to when my son gets a rubber spider and tries to convince his mother it is real. It is that level of a joke.

John makes it seem like he hired his staff based on appearance alone, and even made jokes about it to Elly. Apparently, this caused Elly to need to visit with the new hygienist to verify that John only hired her because she looked like Shania Twain / Cheryl Ladd. After the meeting she finds that John was lying. The woman is not dumb, eye candy. In addition to looking like Shania Twain / Cheryl Ladd, Elly describes her as “interesting, intelligent, witty…and really very nice”. Then John crows about how he fooled Elly. He got Elly to believe that he would hire his staff based on appearance alone, and gives his marriage to Elly as example that looks obviously don’t matter to him.

Why would John do that? What point is he trying to make? There is oftentimes an element of these stories taken from the real life of Lynn Johnston that makes me feel there is a significant part of the story being left out from John’s perspective and we will never know what they are. There are a few clues though:

1. We know that Dr. Rod Johnston did, in fact, hire a dental assistant for his office in Lynn Lake who looked enough like Cheryl Ladd for the interviewer in the CBC interview in 1980 to comment on it.
2. In 2 strips of this sequence, John gets so nervous about Elly’s anger that he is shown nervously sweating over it. In today’s strip, he quickly rewords his statement about her appearance in order to avoid it. And yet, he did not reword his statement about the reason why he hired the hygienist, which did upset Elly. He sweats inconsistently.
3. Elly has taken the time to visit with John’s new worker in order to give her approval.
4. John was so upset over the loss of his prior hygienist, Marie; he used terms to describe her, from which a more-than-a-working relationship could be inferred.

Lynn Johnston’s perspective on these strips is quite obvious, particularly from her Macleans interview:

Q: So that was a dream that you had during your own marriage?

A: Well, [my former husband] worked with beautiful women ever since I met him. He's a dentist. He has hygienists and front-desk girls, and there are usually eight girls around him all the time, and he used to travel to the Native villages taking his staff with him, and people in the town would look at me as if to say, "Well, girl, join the club," because in a small northern mining town there's a lot of horsing around, and the joke was you can steal a man's wife, but you don't touch his woodpile, you know? It was rampant up here.

Here you have Lynn’s theme. Just as Dr. John Patterson hired the Shania Twain hygienist, Dr. Rod Johnston worked with beautiful women. The implication is that if Rod Johnston is man enough to be intimate with all those beautiful women, then Lynn should join in the fun.

Q: Adultery is a form of entertainment where you live?

A: It was recreation. It was like a high school, all these different personalities thrown into this one inescapable place where you had to be there together all the time, whether you wanted to or not, and someone you hated might turn out to be the guy in the bar that you're hitting the sack with next year, you know? I didn't have time for that, nor did I want it, but it was there in the town. But I thought there was safety in numbers if he was with a bunch of girls. And they were all really nice people. But I thought to myself, "If I'm going to be a jealous wife, I'll drive myself crazy."

Here Lynn uses the same language as she used with the hygienist in today’s strip: “and really very nice”. In this context, Lynn is using it as a reason that she should not worry about Rod having an affair, along with the idea that there was more than one woman in his office as protection. Nevertheless, we can tell from the Macleans interview, Lynn Johnston did and still does thinks that way about Rod Johnston and his office staff.