The world’s least-retired retired band director, accompanied by his wife and his protégé, attend the Ohio Music Education Conference. Presumably Becky’s attended this conference every year since Harry retired, so it’s unclear why Harriet (a blonde when we last saw her a year ago) needs to point out Harry’s tired old joke.
26 thoughts on “Conventional Humor”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
“Writing” According to Batiuk: If you can’t come up with a good joke, come up with an extremely lame joke and point out the lameness of it! It will be mildly funnier than the lame joke itself!
Who’s footing the bill for the retired band director and his wife to attend this conference. The Westview taxpayers? No wonder the “levy” failed.
Well, damn. Damn it all, I say. Based on the fact that we had Dead Comic Book John on Monday, I was hoping beyond hope that this arc would be a lecture about how all the disparate versions of Hawkman are really quite congruent in terms of comic-book lore.
Since we are instead treated to sub-standard wordplay, I shall demand a full refund, and instruct my accountant that all future payments be rescinded at once.
Let me just put you on hold while I dial. Hello? Yes, the last Funky Winkerbean check–don’t mail that. Not just yet.
What? Free? Seriously? Really? Break out the wheelchair, I’m ready for a stroke!
Check out the extremely rare quadruple hatchet faces in panel one. Yeah, that anon-o-guy counts. Becky is especially hatchet-ed up, she looks like a really shitty sculpture of herself. Nightmarish. And Dinkle turning his head and amusing himself with a bad bit of wordplay seemingly directed at no one is no less disquieting.
Methinks a week of DSH John shoveling pizza into his fat face would have been more entertaining than this “band director convention” is going to be. Old Folksy Dinkle is always a real snore and Becky isn’t exactly a full bottle of No-Doz either. I was never a big Original Dinkle fan but his over-the-top megalomania was amusing at times. But Old Folksy Dinkle is just a drag, another annoying old coot in a town full of them.
Where to begin? Weak-ass PUNchline. Honestly, I wouldn’t have known it was wordplay if Fat ‘n’ Gray hadn’t pointed it out. A joke about “having a score to settle” would have been a small step in the right direction. Or better yet, leave the annoying non-stop punning to Goatee Boy.
Also, Clunky Dialog Alert — Why does he have to say “Even though I’m retired?” The two women are keenly aware he’s retired. Why not just say he still likes to come to the convention, and leave it at that?
And why is Lisa/Summer/Mopey Pete at the convention? Oh, wait, it’s Ol’ One Arm. Just noticed. If you look reeeeeal carefully, you’ll see BatArt worked the pinned up sleeve into the second panel.
Hope there’s a break-out session on one-armed conducting.
And I also hope Dinkle has a stroke of his own. Right there on the convention floor. Then next year, he can tell the ladies, “Nit all lays fum giddagetha ncompay natz.”
So I wait all this time for Fred to check out, and instead we get Harry Dingleberry? At least with Fred there was a chance the strip would take a turn for the better as he took a turn for the worse…
Jeffcoat called it right yesterday. Yesterday’s strip simply allowed Batiuk to waste a day setting up this week’s strips, but since it didn’t feature the actual characters from this week’s plot, he has to do another establishing strip today to introduce the arc. John and Funky had no business being a part of this convention story.
I wonder if we went back and looked through the archives, how many strips in sequence would be like that: redundant, ineffectual attempts to introduce the storyline. It could be as high as 15%. If you wanted to go broader and merely count the number of redundant strips, it’d be much higher. Frex:
Monday: “I’m your sister!”
Tuesday: “You’re my sister?”
Wednesday: “I can’t believe you’re my sister!”
Thursday: “I really am your sister!”
Friday: “Mom, did you know I had a sister?”
Saturday: “Son, I was born a poor girl in an Iowa farm town back in 1947.”
Sunday Recap.
Monday: “Tell me about your Iowa farm town.”
Tuesday: “Life was hard. We always had corn in our clothes!”
Wednesday: “And Dad didn’t think girls should go to college!”
Thursday: “Did you know that Lisa died of cancer?”
Friday: “I abandoned Iowa and ran off to Ohio when your father rolled into town in his car that was made in Kyrgyzstan.”
Saturday: “Did you know I had a sister?”
Sunday: Les and Funky are hassled again on their fun run.
Monday: “Does my sister know you’re from Iowa, Mom?”
Tuesday: “What was this about again?”
Wednesday: “Dad had a brain aneurysm that was caused by his irregularity.”
Thursday: “Speaking of regularity, did you know that Les wrote a book about Lisa?”
Friday: “Lisa died of cancer, but she did so with grace and courage.”
Saturday: “Who’s ready for bran muffins?”
Sunday: Ripped-off comic book cover featuring Heroic Lisa fighting an anthropomorphized tumor, with “photo album” framing.
Monday: “It’s nice to know I have a sister.”
Tuesday: “Being in the band isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!”
Wednesday: “I’m going to sit here and annoy you and there’s not a God damn thing you can do about it.”
That’s about where we are today, right?
Wait a minute! What the hell is Harry doing with his mouth in panel 2‽ It’s like a lopsided smirk, but—what’s the opposite of lopsided? Oh no, Harry’s had an unstroke, or someone unrang his palsy bell!
Seriously, his grin’s gone all Cheshire Cat on us, and I half expect him to fade from view in a disconcerting—get it? Disconcerting?—manner tomorrow.
“Even though I’m the retired former band director from Westview High, I still enjoy coming to the state music educators conference here in Ohio with you, my wife, and with you, Becky, the current band director at Westview High, who left her creepy meat-faced “husband” at home alone to eat pizza and “batch” himself.”
There ya go, BatchYuck. Fixed it for ya. You’re slipping, buddy.
What happened to Act II Becky? It seems she was a nice, likeable person, now she’s an angry old jerk with some sort of brown fungus growing out of her head.
Oh look, an arc about the conference where Tom Batiuk just happens to be making an official appearance at. That’s not egotistical at all.
I hope this arc ends with Dinkle jumping off of a bridge, or a clef, either one is fine with me.
“Even though I’m retired… I still enjoy coming to the State Music Educators Convention because it gives me an excuse to repeat my lame “comparing notes” joke to my wife, even though we could just perform that little piece of foreplay at home and then go to bed. Actually, I do tell that joke to her every night in bed. I have no idea why I’m at the State Music Educators Convention. Nobody here likes me, because they can’t understand the brilliance of my “comparing notes” joke.”
This is a rare depiction of Becky without a pinned-up sleeve being shoved in our faces.
And when the pinned-up sleeve goes subtle, what is there left to live for?
Wasn’t Harry Dinkle going deaf?, What’s the point in going to a Music
Director’s Convention if you can’t hear a damn thing….
…wait a second…come to think of it..a music educators convention is
the perfect place for a deaf person.
I see what you did with the banner there.
Here’s the deal—Becky was married to Wally who went missing and came back. And they had a kid. And there was a wreck and she lost her arm in the wreck (I missed most of Act II so not sure if that wreck was off screen or not. )
And the Wally is back AND NOT A FREAKING THING IS MADE OF IT! Wally has some type of weird amnesia–but no attempt to connect to his kid, no nothing–all we get are Dinkle jokes and band practice stuff–insted of resolving the DSH/Wally/One Armed Becky triangle and its effect on Wally’s kid who is anywhere from 4 years old to 16.
Geez.
Becky: “Kind of weird that you still drop by the school every day AND attend these conventions yearly, Harry, what with your tragic hearing loss and all.”
Harry: “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, By the way, how are your children and your evil mother Roberta, Beckers?”
Becky: “FORGET IT! JUST FORGET I BROUGHT IT UP!”
Harry: “Okay, I will!”
Harriet: “…the same lack of continuity every year.” *superior smirk*
I figured out why Meat Faced Kid Toucher holds his pizza all weird like that. His hand is cramped up from “batching it” all day.
bobanero: Subtle, yes. But you can still see it, albeit barely. I’d expect a full-scale pinned-up sleeve display before this snoozer of an arc is through. If she didn’t have one arm, Becky wouldn’t have a single distinguishing characteristic at all.
What does Becky do when it’s time to applaud the keynote speaker? Does she have one of those fake clappers you can get at the dollar store?
Followed the link to the Ahia Music Educators Conference. Their logo says “Tuning Up for Change.” So is EVERYONE in Ahia a punning idiot?
Lynn, Becky and Dinkle must be a real pair – HE can’t hear the keynote speaker and SHE can’t applaud him. Life in Ahia seems to really suck most of the time.
I think Becky in panel one has such an unusual profile because she looks as if she’s clenching her jaw in aggravation from hanging around these two idiots for too long.
“God damn it, he’s going to lead up to one of his stupid puns. I just know it. Grit through it. Just pretend you don’t want to strangle him every time he does that. Oh God damn it, there it goes. ‘Compare notes’, what a stupid asshole. God help me. I can’t let myself strangle him, not because I don’t want him to die, but because with just this one arm I won’t be successful.”