Just two strips ago, Funky was being a pill to the office’s receptionist for a joke he completely walked into… and yet here he is in today’s strip indignant that Dr. Droopy won’t sanction his buffoonery. Stay in your lane, Funky. Les is supposed to be the guy who gets huffy when other people make jokes but then expects everyone to laugh at his pathetic stabs at humor.
I was going to suggest that Dr. Droopy here was being presumptuous here bringing up Captain Kirk, not that it would make Funky any less insufferable. I thought perhaps Funky was referencing the legend of Admiral David Farragut or perhaps he is actually a big fan of the band Pain, regionally-popular purveyors of late-90s pop punk (from whom I pilfered, purloined, and repurposed today’s post-title). But nope… a brief search of the SOSF archives reveals that, in a rare bit of Batiukverse continuity, Dr. Droopy is correctly referencing when Funky previously pulled this miserable excuse for a joke back in August 2019.
Callback or not, Funky ought to be tossed out of the doctor’s office window.
Son of Stuck Funky 
What’s next, an old-fashioned eye chart gag? “I-C-U-P…heyyyyy, wait a minute!”. Sigh.
Oh, Funky’s obviously a big fan of Pain, all right. Not physical pain, mind you; he kvetches about every little ache and pulled muscle on the running track or gym. No, he instead revels in inflicting emotional pain on those around him with his hangdog expressions, moribund worldview, and unfunny outbursts of bad puns and convoluted wordplay. To say nothing of the culinary torture he serves his restaurant’s patrons on a daily basis. At this he is a true master.
On the other hand…anyone else out there imagine that, once his receptionist has gone home and the office is closed, Dr. Droopy puts on a white shirt and black vest, climbs into his chair/console, and starts yelling to Chewie about how they have to make the jump to Hyperspace now if they hope to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?
I picture Dr. Droopy as more the type to put on a second hand boat captain hat and start quoting forgettable Kelsey Grammar lines from Down Periscope.
Oooh, now that’s a deep cut.
Hey now, I hear that real submariners love Down Periscope. It’s sort of what My Cousin Vinny is to lawyers: a light comedy that has a lot more substance than it lets on. Apparently its portrayal of the kind of people you meet on submarine crews, and submarine life in general, is pretty accurate.
No, I don’t imagine that at all. Because I cannot imagine any character in this world doing anything fun or whimsical, ever. These people hate fun. Their only satisfaction in life is in making sure everyone else is as miserable as they are.
Because they love being miserable. They love their low-paying dead-end jobs, their snotty customers, their terrible jokes, their bitter marriages to their random spouses, their inept local sports teams, their disgusting Montoni’s pizza with coffee, their multiverse-free Inedible Pulp comic books, and their endless calendar of meetings, banquets, and conventions. And above else, they love mourning Dead Lisa, even though she’s the only person in this world who’s died since the Bush administration.
Making each other miserable feels like a social contract in Westview. Funky tells a bad joke to annoy the doctor; the doctor annoys Funky by denying him the pleasure of telling the joke. Even though they just played the opposite roles in the past two days; Funky denied the receptionist’s joke, and the doctor made the joke about the DVR clocks. It’s an endless cycle. If anyone broke out of this pattern and did something genuinely fun, even in private, the town would quickly shun them.
Bull died not too long ago, and his wife was awarded his brain bucket.
Yeah really. They passed that thing around like it was a joint. Even though it would have been stained with Bull’s entrails. And was ironclad proof that Bull killed himself intentionally, a fact the police covered up and nobody else assigned any relevance to.
The joke was kind of a stretch even in 2019. “Guy sits in chair surrounded by complicated equipment” is only vaguely reminiscent of the Enterprise‘s bridge. Inserting the same joke again without showing the complicated equipment is a step in the wrong direction.
Also, opthamology equipment hasn’t changed much in 40 years. Most of the devices in that drawing are just like when I first got glasses in the early 1980s. But Batiuk makes a “new technology, amirite” joke about it anyway. What a jackass.
Just had my eyes checked last month, I never thought about anything starship related. I could see this joke working in Calvin and Hobbes though.
Is it just me, or did anyone else think those Pain songs were influenced by “Punk Rock Girl” (1988) – The Dead Milkmen, and by “Ursula Finally Has Tits” (1993) – The Queers?
Thanks to the Funkster who posted a link to Minor Threat a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing the shit out of them since.
I’m sure Pain took a lot of influence from preceding punk rock groups like those, especially those that would have worked there way down into the band’s unlikely place of origin in Alabama. I was never much into the punk scene, but I found Pain to be a funnier take on the genre than most of what I had come across, plus I’m a sucker for a decent horn section in any group and with Pain I could get horns with something different than the 3rd wave ska sound most of their contemporaries with horn sections employed.
In any event, I’m pretty sure they say “full speed ahead” more often in one song than Kirk ever did on all of Star Trek. I recall Kirk typically ordering the Enterprise to travel at specific warp speeds rather than to run at “full speed”.
Once or twice on the original Star Trek, Sulu had a kind of microscope-thing that rose from his navigation console. That’s probably what Batiuk is referencing. See my note yesterday about “the more obscure your references, the smarter you are.”
Check out the BattyBlog, he posted some more tripe yesterday. Yes, comics can be used to tell an interesting story. But Tom, you have to tell an interesting story, this is where you fail.
He goes on and on about how real comics always told serious stories and the goofy joke a day strips are bastardized versions of those pure comics.
Again, if it’s not interesting, it’s not interesting! If your work really was good, you wouldn’t have to justify it like this.
What”s so insulting about today’s strip is that a character doesn’twant to hear a joke that wasgood enough for the audience. In a detailed single-panel Sunday strip, no less. It’s like being invited over for dinner and learning that the hosts’ dog won’t eat what they served you.
Abd don’t tell me the eye doctor just doesn’t have a sense of humor, because (a) he delivered yesterday’s punchline; (b) he hired a receptionist who makes even worse jokes; (c) he has a job to do and is justified in keeping things moving; and most importantly (d) he’s 100% right that Funky’s joke sucks.
As for the recent Funkyblog entries: I’m pretty sure Batiuk is just jerking us around with this “Cartooning Commandments” stuff.
First, he says he found the Cartooning Commandments on the Internet. Give me a break. Tom Batiuk hates the Internet.
Second, there are no “Cartooning Commandments” on the Internet anyway. A Google search for that phrase turns up only the Funkyblog reference to it, and a course syllabus for an Editorial Cartooning class at the University of Oregon. And those commandments aren’t the ones he means, because Batiuk gives a different #1 than what is in that list.
And look what it is: “Thou shalt only do funny comic strips. They’re called the ‘comics’ for a reason.” The very thing Batiuk complains about more than anything else in the world. He goes on to argue that “comic strips” became a misnomer for sequential art and stories that weren’t necessarily comical. I find his argument rather weak, but what does it matter anyway when it’s a rebuttal to a ‘commandment’ he just made up?
Because I don’t think these “Cartooning Commandments” exist, unless someone else can find evidence that they do. There are other sets of purported rules that are easy to find on the Internet, like the supposed rules for the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons. But I think this whole “Commandments” thing is just Batiuk making an elaborate straw man argument for himself. All the commandments will turn out to be phony arguments against the way he wants to do things, and his rebuttals will be why he should be allowed to do them.
You hit the nail on the head in that last sentence. From my side, I honestly don’t care if he really found the Cartooning Commandments online, or if it’s a narrative device. I do care that the Commandments bear no resemblance to reality as I know it. As I wrote very late on yesterday’s post, there are and were plenty of “soap opera” comic strips that aren’t particularly funny (at least, not intentionally). And most of them were around before FW even started, let alone before it got “serious”. Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, Mark Trail, Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, Gil Thorp…
If that’s the way he feels about “comic strips”, I wonder why he hasn’t tried to produce a graphic novel? It sounds like that’s actually what he wants to do. Since it seems like he might be unaware of the existence of Manga, maybe he also doesn’t know about graphic novels? He could read Will Eisner’s Contract with God for an example of how to do it. And then fail spectacularly, and probably hilariously.
He doesn’t do that because it would show he cannot produce an engaging story. He still has sour grapes that he didn’t win that Pulitzer.
So as Banana Jr explains, he creates a straw man argument and looks to blame everyone else for not recognizing his greatness. See, it is us readers who are at fault, we aren’t reading comics properly. If we did, then we could appreciate his work.
Again, if he wants to tell a story, then tell a damn story already. Quit talking about it.
Perhaps he doesn’t want to work in a genre that already “allows” serious content (by his estimation) because that wouldn’t be “breaking the mold”? Or maybe it’s just that the strips pay the bills, and he doesn’t feel any desire to do extra work on top of that. I can only guess.
I think Batiuk is well aware that he cannot tell a story. How many times has Starbuck Jones or the Amazing Sponge been featured here, yet we’ve never seen a single frame of one of their stories? We haven’t because he can’t.
He doesn’t want to produce a graphic novel because no one will pay him an advance to do it.
In Tom Batiuk’s mind, artistic validation only comes through mass-media publishing contracts. This is absolutely central to Batiuk and everything he writes.
Les simply couldn’t write a touching memoir of his beloved wife’s tragic life and death. No, he had to have a publishing contract, a book tour, a graphic novel adaptation, an Eisner Award nomination, two different attempts to make a movie, and at least two attempts to sabotage it. All of which were treated with far more importance than everything else in the story. Les and Summer coming to terms with Lisa’s death was skipped over entirely. There are many other examples of this in Funky Winkerbean.
To some extent, I get this. Batiuk has been published since 1972 and may feel he doesn’t need to prove himself to anyone. But all of Act III is a living monument to why he DOES need to prove himself. He cannot tell a story, create a character, write dialog, or do anything at all that would suggest he’d be good at creating a graphic novel. So I totally get the lack of industry interest in him.
I feel sorry for that doctor. He’s one year closer to retirement (one of the few life-goals in the Funkyverse) and what does he get? A warmed-over joke that’s even worse than a full warmed-over Montoni’s pizza. Just wait until he finds that his retirement gift is a small T-square, made of stale chocolate and wrapped in fake gold foil.