ComCast your eyes away from today’s strip if you don’t want the unvarnished TRUTH! If this strip doesn’t make you believe in the conspiracy between big cable and America’s ophthalmologists, then I don’t know what will. The doctor all but admits it!
This doctor, though, I feel like I’ve seen him before…
Can’t quite put my finger on where, but I’ve definitely seen him before.
This isn’t even a joke, it really just more of a weakly wry remark. And it’s barely even that. I’m slightly surprised he’s going with “little clock” over “small print in comic books”, though.
Or smart phones, which have been ubiquitous eye-strainers for over a decade now and also fit the bill of the kind of modern “not like the old days” technology he loves to gripe about.
It would be fascinating to know how many times he’s done a variant of this joke either here or in Crankshaft. Fascinating, but still incredibly tedious and maddening to actually make the effort to read back enough years to find out.
Sorry, gang, but I can’t make a comment today. I’ve got to go see my eye doctor because I think my vision’s getting worse. Try as I might, I can’t see anything close to a joke here.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? He fails to clear even the low bar of humor. But then again, if it were funny, we wouldn’t be so invested in dissecting it.
It really is. You know those “Master classes” that MasterCard sells? I want to see Tom Batiuk’s Master Class. You’ll learn such skills as:
1. Introduction: I almost won a Pulitzer Prize once! Listen to me! Do you want my autograph?
2. Subject Matter: How to use humor as a thinly-veiled soapbox for your own petty opinions and get paid for it
3. Character: How to make everyone in your world a smug, unlikeable, unfunny prick
4. Structure: How to mislead your audience by including unneccessary details, and omitting important ones.
5. Wordplay: Any word that means two different things is automatically funny! If it doesn’t quite fit, force it in!
6. Punchlines: How to prevent your punchlines from being the center of attention, while also pointing out the punchline so everyone knows you made a joke
7. Reactions: How to draw the three different kinds of smirks
8. Mediums: How to build jokes around pronunciation in a printed medium, and why you should never do visual jokes in a visual medium
9. Branching Out: How to whine that people expect you to write jokes instead of endless, soppy cancer stories
10. Development: Who needs it? You already know everything now!
What about it? It’s basically a long form essay of a week’s worth of strips that he had Skunkhead voice a few years ago, led on by The Tooked Dork asking him the leading question as to why they’re called comic strips.
“The entire world collectively thinks that comic strips are low art which must only be humorous” is his own internal quixotic battle regardless, one of several at that. Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of comic strips and their history know that statement is false. Given his self-proclaimed expertise and love of the medium, his willful ignorance of that same fact is just one example of what makes him truly deserving of the scorn that he gets. He knows better, and chooses to say what he says regardless.
To give a little bit of that “cursory knowledge”: there is a long and storied tradition of non-gag-based “soap opera” comic strips. Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, Mark Trail, Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, M.D., and Gil Thorp were all doing business well before FW arrived on the scene, and certainly before FW turned away from gags itself.
And to give my own two cents: I think it’s weird that Batiuk draws this sharp distinction (in the preceding “Match to Flame 138” post) between what is “allowed” in comic books and what is “allowed” in comic strips. The two forms are not that discontinuous. Comic books as we know them started out in the 1930s as republications of newspaper strips, before they began to print original content. Siegel and Schuster originally pitched Superman as a newspaper strip, before cutting and pasting their work into a book format for Action Comics #1. Even in later years, there was some cross-pollination: The Phantom, a newspaper strip, spun off a comic book with original storylines (in Scandinavia) in the 1960s, while the Spider-Man newspaper strip started in 1977.
Son of Stuck Funky 
This isn’t even a joke, it really just more of a weakly wry remark. And it’s barely even that. I’m slightly surprised he’s going with “little clock” over “small print in comic books”, though.
Or smart phones, which have been ubiquitous eye-strainers for over a decade now and also fit the bill of the kind of modern “not like the old days” technology he loves to gripe about.
It would be fascinating to know how many times he’s done a variant of this joke either here or in Crankshaft. Fascinating, but still incredibly tedious and maddening to actually make the effort to read back enough years to find out.
This is just Monday’s strip again, except he took out the punchline.
How could he take out something that was never there?
Sorry, gang, but I can’t make a comment today. I’ve got to go see my eye doctor because I think my vision’s getting worse. Try as I might, I can’t see anything close to a joke here.
And I’m too lazy to go to the drugstore to get some $0.99 cheaters.
This isn’t how you do a callback! The callback should be the punchline.
“What brings you in today, Funky?”
“I think it’s time for me to get new glasses.”
“Can’t see the clock on the DVR anymore?”
Or:
“I think it’s time for me to get new glasses.”
“Can’t see the clock on the DVR anymore?”
“How did you…” “Those clocks bring in a lot of business.”
Either of those would be a lot better. And the emotions make no sense either. Funky goes from smiling to worried to surprised.
Tom Batiuk’s inability to tell a joke is mind-boggling. He can’t seem to get even one thing right.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? He fails to clear even the low bar of humor. But then again, if it were funny, we wouldn’t be so invested in dissecting it.
It really is. You know those “Master classes” that MasterCard sells? I want to see Tom Batiuk’s Master Class. You’ll learn such skills as:
1. Introduction: I almost won a Pulitzer Prize once! Listen to me! Do you want my autograph?
2. Subject Matter: How to use humor as a thinly-veiled soapbox for your own petty opinions and get paid for it
3. Character: How to make everyone in your world a smug, unlikeable, unfunny prick
4. Structure: How to mislead your audience by including unneccessary details, and omitting important ones.
5. Wordplay: Any word that means two different things is automatically funny! If it doesn’t quite fit, force it in!
6. Punchlines: How to prevent your punchlines from being the center of attention, while also pointing out the punchline so everyone knows you made a joke
7. Reactions: How to draw the three different kinds of smirks
8. Mediums: How to build jokes around pronunciation in a printed medium, and why you should never do visual jokes in a visual medium
9. Branching Out: How to whine that people expect you to write jokes instead of endless, soppy cancer stories
10. Development: Who needs it? You already know everything now!
Bonus content…Pun: The highest form of humor
Bonus Content 2: Using obscure references that your readers won’t get only means that your work is much, much too smart for them.
Funky looks terrified in that last panel. Like he suddenly saw Les’ face.
I feel like everyone who kept telling Calvin that “bats aren’t bugs” when he was doing his oral report–DVRs don’t have clocks!
The content of today’s offering reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s comment about her birthplace (Oakland) – “there’s no there there.”
For our sideways Sunday viewing pleasure, Funky will fall in the lens grinder and make a pair of glasses of himself.
Oh my God, whatever you do don’t read today’s entry on the Funky Winkerbean blog…
What about it? It’s basically a long form essay of a week’s worth of strips that he had Skunkhead voice a few years ago, led on by The Tooked Dork asking him the leading question as to why they’re called comic strips.
“The entire world collectively thinks that comic strips are low art which must only be humorous” is his own internal quixotic battle regardless, one of several at that. Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of comic strips and their history know that statement is false. Given his self-proclaimed expertise and love of the medium, his willful ignorance of that same fact is just one example of what makes him truly deserving of the scorn that he gets. He knows better, and chooses to say what he says regardless.
To give a little bit of that “cursory knowledge”: there is a long and storied tradition of non-gag-based “soap opera” comic strips. Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, Mark Trail, Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, M.D., and Gil Thorp were all doing business well before FW arrived on the scene, and certainly before FW turned away from gags itself.
And to give my own two cents: I think it’s weird that Batiuk draws this sharp distinction (in the preceding “Match to Flame 138” post) between what is “allowed” in comic books and what is “allowed” in comic strips. The two forms are not that discontinuous. Comic books as we know them started out in the 1930s as republications of newspaper strips, before they began to print original content. Siegel and Schuster originally pitched Superman as a newspaper strip, before cutting and pasting their work into a book format for Action Comics #1. Even in later years, there was some cross-pollination: The Phantom, a newspaper strip, spun off a comic book with original storylines (in Scandinavia) in the 1960s, while the Spider-Man newspaper strip started in 1977.