So good to know that both Centerville twins are alive and well, after a rare solo appearance of Emily or Amelia in Tuesday’s comic. Over in the Crankiverse, these two are still interchangeable, not-too-bright tween girls. But by the time they transferred to Westview High, they had developed distinct persona: Emily, the goody-goody flautist, and Amelia, the shredder of guitars.
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Son of Stuck Funky · The web's premiere source for Funky Winkerbean snark
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Sundial”…ha. That’s nothing. There used to be a WHS student named Funky Winkerbean. Go ahead and try to top THAT.
Sheesh, can that girl smirk any harder at any less of a joke?
Another disconnected strip. And what’s with that home made set with the minuscule anchor desk? Didn’t the local station donate its old set to the school when they updated theirs? Or is that something I imagined happened in the Funkyverse?
And today even the artwork looks like it was mailed in.
That’s a symptom of the Funkyverse: Batiuk thinks as small as possible about everything. A recycled set from a professional broadcast studio? Much too awesome for this strip! It has to shrivel down from John Holmes to PeeWee Herman.
Nice blue streaks in Lestoils hair. And one of those twerps …. twins …. outgrew her brown hair.
“Sundial? I thought he got that nickname when he fell asleep on the French class field trip to the nude beach.”
I’m amazed that anyone, anyone at all would find this funny.
I’m amazed that the guy who wrote this thought, “Yes! I’ve still got it! Another one into the pile.”
Anyone else would have taken a sharpie and blackened the slip of paper with this joke. He’d then burn the paper and bury it in the compost heap.
“Welp, that’s forty-six weeks done. Shit, I’m still six weeks short and it’s already January 8th. Let’s see…(reaches folder labeled “Crap, do not use unless emergency”)…hmmm, I guess these aren’t SO bad…”
More like “Whoa, these are pretty darn good! Why’d I stash these in this folder? Man, these are awesome!”
This strip should be unintentionally funny. But it fails at that too.
The joke is so mild and so botched, and the reaction is so ridiculously oversold, that the strip should be funny for how misguided it is. This is exactly the combination of mismatched tone, incompetent storytelling, and over-the-top reactions that made The Room such a masterpiece. A lot of Internet humor is based on the same combination. But it just doesn’t work here.
I think the problem is Tom Batiuk’s insincerity. That head-cracking smirk isn’t borne from an honest but misconceived idea of how comedy works. It’s there to manipulate you. It’s a cheap tactic, and we subconsciously recognize it. Tommy Wiseau’s mistakes are fascinating to watch because he genuinely thinks he’s making a serious drama.
Moral of the story: whatever you do, be authentic. It will make your writing better, even in ways you don’t intend.
Not only are the boys slow, but they’re apparently suffering from Droopy Punctuation Syndrome. You know, that’s the condition where your apostrophe (“girls’ team”) goes flaccid and winds up in comma position (“boys, team”) as oen reads from panel to panel. It usually happens in men over 40, and keeps them from sharing matching bathtubs with their spouses on the beach.
By the way, is Grady Twin #1 on the girls’ track team, or does Les simply feel it’s politically correct to congratulate her on the win because she and the athletes both have XX chromosomes?
Those twins are like Lisa. Is there anything they cannot do?
They’re opposed to guns:
Oh, wait, no they’re not:
No. I’ll give Bathack that one. There’s a major difference between child-murdering shooters with easy access to guns and children playing with toy guns. I haven’t seen any credible evidence that kids with toy guns stand a significantly increased risk of growing up to become killers. And as they say, you never hear of a pacifist who grew up playing “Save the Whales.”
What’s really absurd in the second panel is the idea that a carnival game isn’t rigged to make winning so easy.
I could give it a pass if the strips were in a different order. But the gun protest came 5 months before twin #2’s boasting of her BB gun prowess. Any high schooler who is sufficiently compelled to join an anti-gun protest would also be compelled to rethink BB guns as a hobby. It wasn’t something she did once, it was such a part of her life that it made her skillful at shooting contests. And absolutely no relevance is given to this contradiction.
This is really just another failure of storytelling in the Funkyverse. Batiuk gives his characters whatever trait they need for his current soapbox, with no regard to how it ties in with their established character.
Farbeit for me to correct someone who’s been writing jokes about high school sports for almost 50 years. But i’m pretty sure cross country isn’t about going fast.
I smirked today.
The punchline doesn’t even make sense. Sundials aren’t slow, they’re immobile. The shadow of a sundial slowly moves across several hours, but so does every other shadow. I even started to speculate about their parallel paths of movement—”Sundial” circling the track, the shadow circling the dial—but then I remembered this was cross-country, not track! Could have called him “Turtle” or ”Sloth” or “Molasses”…but no, we got “Sundial”.
To undermine my own argument, he could have been nicknamed “Sundial” during track season, and then carried it over to cross-country. Though that doesn’t make the punchline any less abstruse.