early out-of-context jokes, from June 22, 1967, was this one: Peter: "I used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth." B.C.: "What does it revolve around?" Peter: "The United States!" Another early example: Near Christmas time, the apteryx, dressed as Santa Claus, modified his usual spiel: "Hi there, I'm an Apterclaus, a wingless toymonger with batteries not included!" A devout Christian, Hart included didactic references to the death and resurrection of Jesus in Easter installments. The Washington Post columnist and comics critic Gene Weingarten suggested that B.C. is actually set not in the past but in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future. Format and style B.C. follows a gag-a-day format, featuring (mostly) unrelated jokes from day to day, plus a color Sunday strip. Occasionally it will run an extended sequence on a given theme over a week or two. It also follows the convention of Sunday strips with a short, setup/payoff joke in the first two panels, followed by an extended gag, which allows newspapers to trim the opening panels for space. The principal cast is small and varied, with each character imbued with a developed personality. "The art style, like that of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, masks sophisticated minimalism with a casually scratchy veneer," according to comics historian Don Markstein. Dry humor, prose, verse, slapstick, irony, shameless puns and wordplay, and comedic devices such as Wiley's Dictionary (where common words are defined humorously with a twist, see Daffynition) make for some of the mix of material in B.C. Example: "Rock (verb): To cause something or someone to swing or sway, principally by hitting them with it!"—from an early 1967 strip. Or: "Cantaloupe (noun): What the father of the bride asks after seeing the wedding estimate!" There are running gags relating to the main cast and to a variety of secondary, continuing characters. One such periodic recurring gag has Peter communicating with an unseen pen-pal on the other side of the ocean, writing a message on a slab of rock that he floats off into the horizon. It is invariably returned the same way, with a sarcastic reply written on the reverse side. These segments use silent or "pantomime" panels (indicating that time has elapsed; night falls and dawn rises) between the set-up and the delayed punch line—typical of Hart's idiosyncratic use of "timing" in B.C. Controversies The B.C. daily strip from December 7, 2006, attracted criticism for defining infamy as "a