Mason walks around with that same stupid smirk all the time, but why must Les look askance at Funky in today’s strip? Could it be that, having been so immersed in Hollywood–even rescuing a starlet from a wildfire!–Les is starting to see his hometown Ohio friends as pathetic, smalltime losers? He can’t wait to get back to whatever’s left of Hollywood, where he’ll get to hang out on the set of Lisa’s Story and ogle Marianne in her Lisa drag.
Well, You Ain’t Never Caught a Rabbit
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
The blind leading the lame.
Probably just that he thinks he’s superior to everyone, period.
Has Funky fallen off the wagon? Because a joke about “rabbit stewed” seems in place here.
Wait, why is Funky wearing a T-shirt for his pizza place? Isn’t everyone in Cancerview already very aware of it?
Funky is required by law to wear a warning label.
Product placement! Today’s strip has the Montoni’s logo and name, a lovingly-drawn Mentor Rotary logo, and the text “Lisa’s Legacy Run” twice. Monday and Tuesday’s strips featured the event banner, name, and logo prominently. It’s like an Adam Sandler movie, except that instead of Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts and Budweiser we’re bludgeoned with Montoni’s, Lisa’s Legacy Run and the Mentor, Ohio Rotary Club.
This further supports Cabbage Jack’s theory from yesterday: that this week’s arc is an attempt to save the real-life Lisa’ Legacy Run from cancellation. I bet we get that Rotary logo all six days this week. And a strip where the dialog is “I love Lisa’s Legacy Run! It’s put on by the Mentor Rotary every year!”
Batty loves this kind of thing. I’m surprised the syndicate allows it.
He probably gets away with it because it’s “charity.” And because the syndicate imposes no standards of any kind on the strip.
Well I see that for this week we may be returning to the gag-a-day format.
Definitely. I look at this strip every day, and what I saw there makes me want to gag.
We are gagging.
i like how the baby has a ghost hand, like Larry Niven’s Gil Hamilton.
Gawd, even the dog has an annoying self satisfied smile.
Westview. Where the women are silent, the dogs are smug, and all the children are assumed missing.
While Funky’s sad-sack haplessness is one of the less offensive things about the strip, it just seems weirdly out of place today. Smoke inhalation, magic robots, a natural disaster, then Funky’s pitiful brand of goofy slapstick…it’s just all over the place lately.
This is the kind of gag TB has written since day 1, and back in Act I he would have used it at the expense of Les… “Look at this poor sap, eh? Don’t feel too bad for him because he’s such a dope that he’s kinda asking for the ridicule.”
But you are correct, placed in modern Funky Winkerbean, in between its latest attention-seeking prestige plots, produces tonal whiplash. These gags just don’t land like they used to because of this.
They also don’t land because Funky, who years ago was moved into the Act I Les role in this strip, is a generally responsible adult who has gone through a host of sobering (pun intended) life experiences. We’re supposed to laugh at the tubby ex-alcoholic who tosses cheap pizza to meet payroll is while his best “friend” jets off to LA to pal around with the movie star who is married to his ex-wife? Why? It worked with Act I Les because he was an off-putting teenager with the kind of inflated sense of self that is not uncommon in teenagers. We chuckled when he once again got stuck on that rope in gym class and didn’t really mind it when his poorly conceived words failed to keep Bull’s fist from meeting his nose because he was also the shmuck who copied Funky’s homework and wouldn’t stop pestering girls who didn’t want to date him.
Well put. He dropped everything to suddenly do the annual cancer fun run arc just completely out of nowhere, then tried to link the cancer movie to the fun run, then by the third day he’s already doing Funky sad-sack gags. It’s all so completely random.
It’s like the strip has ADD. Batiuk slammed on the brakes in the middle of a lengthy, slow-moving Lisa’s Story arc to burn down Los Angeles while also premiering Starbuck Jones, going to Murania, and bringing out the Lisa tapes. Was one Lisa plot and one sci-fi derailment not enough? By Sunday we’ll have three of each.
Of course, there’s nothing at all wrong with living in a small town and being content with that, being in recovery, making pizza for a living, and/or physically declining with age. These are supposed to be normal, everyday characters. Batiuk has stayed in Ohio. The way Funky is treated here seems snobbish.
I kind of understand why BatYam was constantly sticking it to Bull and why he’s so tough on Cindy, as those characters were more or less adversarial toward Les back in (sigh) high school. But I’ll never understand why Funky became his favorite punching bag. I have to assume it has something to do with the unfortunate title he stupidly saddled himself with, which probably seemed hilarious in 1972.
With all the retcons, he could have given Funky a “real” name. He could also have renamed the strip.
Batiuk wants to make Les the central figure in FW, which to Batiuk means making him more successful than anyone else. Les gets the fame, fortune and hot wife. He travels and people admire him until they get to know him.
It fails because Batiuk doesn’t know how to make a character look successful without being a self-absorbed jerk. People still like Funky, so Batiuk has to turn him into a failure to provide a contrast with Les. He drinks, he struggles to stay on the wagon, he has business problems, his health is terrible. Yet Funky hangs in there. Les may get the rewards, but Funky gets the admiration. Plus he doesn’t use his wife and children as props in his life.
Hey, is Blind Pew pushing his biological child in that stroller, or is that his imaginary younger self that only he can “see”?
Naw. The baby is real. But the dog is a hallucination of his depression that follows him around to berate him. Hence the smug expression.
He’s going to the Admiral Benbow after the run to hoist a tankard of grog.
The dog is going to dump a load, isn’t it? Because Batiuk always has to find a new way to dump on Funky.
Combining your comment with mine above. Le Shat Brown.
And of course, the reason Funky has to be shat upon is stupid and petty: despite being friendly to Les, he was more beloved than Les back in high school so must face sanctions and reprimands.
Just as Franco is still dead, Funky is still obese.
Is the Montoni’s logo supposed to represent the aftermath of a pizza oven explosion?
Either that or the aftermath of eating Montoni’s Pizza
More research problems…. Even with leader dogs, blind parents do not push strollers because they can’t be sure what they might push their baby into, such as low branches, etc. They use strollers with reversible handles and PULL them behind them.
Also, there’s nothing indicating that’s a service dog.
I don’t think the runner is blind. I think he’s wearing Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses which, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explains, follow the principle “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” and turn completely dark and opaque at the first sign of danger. What could be worse than being a character in FW?