Link to today’s Sensible Chuckle
It’s an Act I-style high school gag, and not too bad in it’s own inoffensive aw-shucks kind of way. Notice that the intern must be drawing Alex again today because she’s back to being a chubby goth cutie instead of the horrific middle-aged fat nun who regularly graces the dailies.
I am sorta dreading the reappearance of Professor Shlabotnick or whatever the hell name Bats gives Mark Twain there. Seems we just got done with a week of crappy jokes from our old paisan’ Tony – I’m not up for a series of gags that were rejected by Henny Youngman for being too stupid.
Son of Stuck Funky 
If today’s the last day to get the permission slips in, isn’t it too late for a reminder? Unless they’re going to deliver them that evening to Jim’s home?
And seriously, even the classroom signs are hung up with a crappy tape job? And apparently they’re handwritten. And there’s no number on the door.
It would be funnier if there weren’t so much damned verbiage. As it is, the joke is smothered under all the unnecessary words.
That’s the problem when you draw your word balloons a year ahead of time, and have no idea what you’ll fill them with a year later.
Crappy joke, inconsistent artwork, too many words. Batty has hit a new low. Does anyone think he puts any effort into this at all? Heyitsdave spends less than 5 min, and his stuff is hilarious.
This is definitely an Act I kind of gag. What a comic, Funky Winkerbean, where “high school teachers loathe their students” is considered a “classic” gag.
And after the absurdity of today’s strip, next week somebody will probably die–I’m hoping either Mason or Les–or, if we’re lucky, both.
So he’s gonna bail on SJ again, eh? I guess he figures he doesn’t want to get his readers too, you know…interested in a story or anything like that. Plus he has to use those WHS gags before Owen and Cody cross the Rubicon and end up like Summer, Keisha, Maddie and the rest of Act III’s “new generation”.
Roberta Blackburn should be protesting this trip because the science class isn’t going to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s only across the river from Cincinnati.
So the senior class is going on a trip to the science museum and Washington, DC? In the three weeks or less before they graduate?
Nobody–not their parents, and certainly not their teachers–want to deal with Les and Funky 2.0. And nobody is surprised.
On the one hand, we have St Battick, Guardian Spirit of Ineptly Taped Signage oblivious to the fact that he can’t uncross the Rubicon. On the other, Jeff just paid a hack one large to be told he’s never going to heal from his terrible childhood.
@Paul–judging by the reaction to the “time pool” arc, he actually could just go back across the Rubicon to Act I or II and the few of us who would have noticed would probably prefer it. (btw, doesn’t Jeff’s shrink visit look like Les’ at the very beginning of Act III?)
Someone really to teach Jim how to properly use “Just For Men”.
Thing I just don’t get is how are Cody, Owen, and now Alex so loathed by the faculty at Westview High? What have they done to justify the unending contempt and disgust that forms most of the jokes around them when an adult is present? They seem, all things considered, to be pretty good kids. They involve themselves in extracurricular activities. They’re not bullies. They’re not smart asses. They don’t vandalize school property (Owen’s molasses moment toward the then-senior class eight years ago notwithstanding). They don’t harass or otherwise assault the faculty or staff. What on earth have they done that would prevent a teacher, someone who is paid to spend time with children, to decide they want nothing to do with them?
I mean, I know they’re dopes, but that’s not Batiuk’s point of view. They can’t help their creator’s limitations regarding sympathetic characters. But Batiuk regularly portrays his characters treating them as if they’re toxic.
Heck–giving the science teacher authority to hire extras and replace the script for the Starsux movie makes as much sense as anything else in this strip…