Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!
To celebrate the holiday of love and romance, Batiuk has graced us with a touching strip of an ommetaphobic man who has completely lost his mind after days of being forced to self-apply eye drops.
Remember this is a guy who had to be physically restrained a month ago by multiple people to have drops put in.
That explains his increasingly erratic behavior since the surgery. And the slow decline of his joy since Monday. Every single day, hour after hour, forced to pry his squinting eyes open with trembling fingers. Forced to carefully drip chemicals into the waiting lids, staring up at the nozzle of the dropper, the fear and nausea triggering a flight or fight response that he can’t let his body obey.
Our drip torture is about to end though. As I’ve peeked into the future and it seems the cataract saga is finally drawing to a close. At least, I hope it’s ending. I suppose we could be up for a repeat in a month, when Funky goes in to have his other eye done. I wouldn’t put that past this strip.
So relax, everyone, tomorrow is a brand new day! A day filled with Dinkle.
Son of Stuck Funky 
So is Funky being a sarcastic jerk, is he genuinely enjoying the eye drops or is he just singing because BatYam thought this would make for a very witty pun? I think we all know the deal there.
And what the f*ck is Dick Facey’s problem? “How’s he coping with having to use eye drops?”…what kind of moronic f*cking question is that? How does one “cope” with needing to use eye drops? And why would anyone need to cope with it at all? They’re eye drops, not fishhooks. You drop them in, it’s at worst mildly unpleasant for a few seconds and that’s it. Plus that stupid look on his dumb bearded face just sent me into an instant rage, like it always does. What a dick.
I guess it’s a fair question, assuming Les knew that Funky had to be held down by multiple people in the eye doctor’s office just to have drops put in. Got over that phobia pretty quickly, though, apparently.
Well, Les is new at showing interest in or concern for anyone who isn’t Dead Lisa or himself. I don’t want to discourage him trying.
Yeah, he was way too unreasonable before and he’s way too happy now. Unless he’s being sarcastic and singing aloud to indicate how close he is to totally snapping, that is. But I don’t think that’s it either. I think he just really, really wanted to use this pun idea no matter how clumsy or dumb it turned out. Mission accomplished there.
So, Funky manages to make his eye-drop routine fun by tying it to a cool rockabilly song.
How AWFUL. Thank goodness Les is there to tell him how he SHOULD be suffering (though not enough to distract from Les, of course.)
Let’s not even talk about how clunky the exposition is in Les’s world balloon. I recognize that Battyuk had to find a way to squeeze “cataract surgery” in there somehow. No, what gets me is “…how is Funky with having to put in all those eyedrops”? This is a sentence coming from the mouth of a high school English teacher? Les sounds more like lovable ’40s character actor S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall playing a Bavarian optometrist.
By the by, does that medicine bottle in the title panel say “HCl”? Is Funky putting hydrochloric acid in his eyes? If so, that should take care of any “coping” problem he has soon enough.
And he apparently felt he needed to put “cataract surgery” in there for the benefit of his loyal readers who only read the Sunday strips, as his daily readers are already very well aware that Funky just had cataract surgery, seeing how it’s been the premise of the strip for like three weeks now.
In prescription-label use, HCL means hydrochloride. It’s a salt added to some medicines to make them more soluble in the stomach or bloodstream.
(Just looked at my med labels. Systane “may contain hydrochloric acid to adjust pH.” And Restasis has sodium hydroxide for the same purpose. I’m not going to see what happens if I put a base and an acid in my eyes at the same time. Looking at Funky Winkerbean is bad enough.)
And this strip continues to turn into Pluggers, where all the characters are inexplicably into baby boomer culture from well before their own birth. “Rock Around The Clock” is from 1955, FFS. Funky graduated high school in 1988. This is like a teenager today making a joke about “Everybody Wants To Rule The World.”
Yeah, but Funky, Les, Holly and Co. “started” high school in the early ’70s. As such, he probably knows “:Rock Around the Clock” from being the theme song for “American Graffiti” or the first season of “Happy Days.”
I was mildly surprised that the reference was as current as it was, as I would expect him to be singing a Bing Crosby or Eddie Cantor song or something. It’s very important to keep the strip contemporary, you know.
I’ll admit, I actually found this amusing. Partly because the action is off-screen, so I can imagine Funky getting really into it, trying to shake his hips and put in his eye drops simultaneously.
On the other hand, Les’s facial expression in the panel where he whips his head around is a bit over the top. What, he never heard a guy sing before?
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with Funky and Rock Around the Clock. It works. Les’ expression and head whip, though, makes it appear that Funky is screeching like a cat in pain!
Les goes to visit one of his infirm “friends” and spends nearly all of his time there chatting up the wife about how terrible her existence with her infirm husband now is. This is the same shmuckery he pulled with Bull and Linda.
You’re right, he DOES do this all the time. Plus he was hitting on Cindy the second he arrived in L.A. and he was all over Marianne right before the fire too. He just can’t resist reminding every woman in the strip about what they missed out on.
I can’t just read the comic, I have to sing it in my head. A tip of the drunkenbeard for that one.
HVD!
“So how is Funky coping with all those eyedrops?”
“You were just with him, asshole. Ask him yourself when he gets back. Do I look like Funky’s press secretary?”
“No, you look like Babe Ruth in drag.”
Almost everything about the telling of this joke is wrong.
Let’s start with the timing. Funky doesn’t smirk until the last panel. Look at Les in the next-to-last and third-from-last panels. He looks like Butt-Head trying to piece together what happened when his TV got stolen:
This is a common joke structure in sitcoms. Somebody asks a question about a character who is offscreen, and that character inadvertently answers the question through overheard dialog or noise. That’s the punchline. Not the person still in the scene who explains the joke! Though that could be a secondary punchline if it adds something new.
This setup requires Les to be so stupid that he doesn’t realize Funky’s loud, upbeat singing is the answer to his question. After ten full seconds, because that’s how long it would take Funky to sing that. Imagine watching this scene; it would be dead air. Keep in mind that Les is portrayed as a deeply brilliant writer, whose three books about Lisa combined tragedy and humor more deftly than anyone else could. But in the next-to-last panel; he seems to be asking Holly for help. Or he’s trying to look down her shirt, but she anticipated this and buttoned it all the way to the top before he came over.
On another note, Les’ surprised face is all wrong. It looks more like:
Finally… it’s goddam Valentine’s Day. Shouldn’t today’s strip be a gift of salad dressing, or a Batman-themed wedding or something? Les wouldn’t even be at Funky’s house! He’d be having a romantic dinner at Lisa’s burial plot, having scheduled all other events around it.
That should say “LES doesn’t smirk until the final panel.”
We’ve been binge watching “The Bob Newhart Show” from the 1970s all weekend.