If you want to alienate people, talk about religion or politics. If you want to have a nice conversation, talk about breakfast cereal and newspaper comics.
Can you combine the latter set with the former, just to make conversation easier? A cereal-type discussion of religion would be odd:
"Oh, Catholicism! My mother always bought that. Then we got tired of it, and the kids demanded Zorastroism. But my dad was a Quaker man through and through. Now, of course, I keep it away from my kids, because it's not good for them. We have Confucianism, which is spiritual, but not as sugary."
No, even that's contentious. Could we discuss politics the way we discuss newspaper comics? Possibly, because everyone complains about both. There are people who read the newspaper and feel disappointment that their favorites from the '80s aren't around anymore. But at least no one calls up and complains that the Sunday pictures of the politicians have gotten so small they can hardly understand what they're saying.
I have my complaints about the comics. There is one Sunday feature that seemingly exists to demonstrate that 30 years of steady work have no noticeable effect on the artist's ability to draw anything, and since "drawing" seems an integral part of the whole "cartoon" genre, it's a mystery.
One comic I like stopped running new daily strips in 2013, with the note that the artist is on vacation. Every time I look at the strip I imagine a suitcase rolling alone on a baggage carousel for eight years, unclaimed. Yet still we read them. It is the order of the day for us print purists: start the day with the front page of human perfidy and failings, end with a mirthless evaluation of the 54,203rd episode of "Blondie."
Why? Tradition, I suppose. Everything else changes, but "Blondie" endures. We have long forgotten the origins of the strip, how Dagwood was actually a rich kid set to inherit a big industrial empire, but threw it all away to marry a showgirl. His parents did not approve. That's why you never see his parents in any cartoons. They're not dead. They just cut him off.
In an alternate world there might be a strip about his parents that lasted 80 years, and consisted of nothing but two old people sitting around bitterly complaining about the strumpet who seduced their son with her comely gams and loose morals.
