By Any Other Name

Link to today’s strip.

Well, I’m not sure what to say about this one.  Apparently, “customer service” has never made its way into Westview; I recall Dinkle being similarly insulted by a party-store clerk way back when. I’m sure there are other cases my mind refuses to recall.   Perhaps that’s why Khahn’s place went out of business–he just kept heaping the insults onto anyone who walked into the shop.

Of course, maybe I’m not looking at this from a sympathetic perspective–I imagine it must be hard to be confronted with a Dinkle, a Winkerbean or a Moore and not blurt out some measure of the instant loathing that rises in your gorge.  We are, after all, only human.

13 thoughts on “By Any Other Name”

  1. I just cannot believe there’s a “fitness center” in Westview. It has to be in a nearby town like Centerville, Big Walnut or Scoundreltown (where Frankie was originally from). The Westview Fitness Center…lol. You walk in and there’s the skeletal remains of the receptionist, next to a rotary phone and a can of Tab. The corpse is holding a copy of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and is wearing a mood ring. The gym contains a punching bag, a few huge medicine balls and lots of those clubs you swing around over your head. And there’s a pool table and a cigarette machine in the corner and no fire exits.

    This one isn’t really all that bad as far as “meta” self-referential jokes go, I mean it IS a really stupid name and all. I wonder of TB regrets not changing the name when he started doing the yadda yadda thought-provoking manner and etc? He should have grabbed “For Lisa Or For Lisa” when he had the chance. Anyway, all I know is that if I say “Funky Winkerbean” out loud, 99.99% of people look at me like I have Tourettes or something.

  2. #Epicus Doomus, I apologize for only being able to give your comment one thumbs up. Seriously, I almost didn’t make it to the second paragraph I was laughing so hard.

  3. Thanks DOlz. Maybe it’s a good idea for Funky to start hob-nobbing around with Westview’s fittest. Someone’s going to have to hoist that quarter-ton casket in a few years and it sure isn’t going to be that motley collection of pasty-faced pals Funky calls his “friends”, that’s for damn sure.

  5. If Batiuk wants to have some humor about the name of his comic, maybe he should have done it with a character who isn’t a complete and total idiot for insulting someone who hasn’t given her a single dollar yet.

  7. You know those signs they always post in employee areas that say things like “Customer Care is Job #1!” I wonder what they look like in the Funkyverse? “Barely Veiled Contempt is Our Policy!” “Service With a Snide Remark!”

  9. Okay, fine, Mr. Wankerbean. Forgive me – Your name is so silly, I couldn’t restrain myself. So what’s your first name?

  10. I’ve got a sudden urge to bet $100 that this arc gets sidetracked so that Dinkle, Bushka, and the Ghost of Jock Strop can stop by and have their names joked about as well.

    And if we have to endure a character working out at the gym all week, why oh why couldn’t it have been Becky? Batiuk could have even borrowed all of our witty one-liners for the occasion.

  12. I mentioned a while ago about how amusing I found the transformation of this strip from simple gag-a-day to a brutal-honest-depiction-of-how-merciless-life-really-is because the strip’s called Funky Winkerbean. That alone compromises the seriousness of teenage pregnancy stoires, cancer stories, landmine stories, IED stories and any other story where Batiuk attempts to reflect gritty, unrelenting reality.

    It’s as if you read a comic called Floppy’s Fun-Time Adventure, featuring cutesy anthropomorphic animals, when you were a child, only to discover fifteen years later that it retained the name and the characters, but it’s now about a community ravaged by meth addiction and illegal prescription drug abuse.

  13. Oh, and just because you lampshade it, Batiuk, it doesn’t make it any funnier, or less absurd.

Comments are closed.