Here ya go guys! I hope you like it. Because this fuzzy, disgusting thing is the best joke we’re getting this week outside of our own wonderful comments section.
Actually, truth be told, I laughed when I read this one. I mean, it strains credulity that this girl is only now noticing that something she’s putting in her mouth several times a week looks like a fried caterpillar. But I still laughed. The joke stuck the landing for me, even if the routine leading up to it was as thrilling and challenging as Simone Biles sliding directly across the balance beam on her belly.
But I just don’t care. I’m so worn down by the bad pranks this week, the non-punchlines. This followed a tried and true humor formula: set-up, surprise, and realization. The set up is a filthy reed, the surprise is that Dinkle doesn’t just tell her to toss it, the realization is that making a sarcastic comment about science projects is totally in character for him.
The slimmest weakest of jokes that I can’t bring myself mock. Maybe I’m feeling extra charitable since it’s the beginning of Lent. And as we read in Matthew 12:20 “A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.”
If he won’t crush the bruised reed, who am I to quash the moldy one?
PS: Thanks to everyone who liked my story yesterday! It’s nice to know that when Batiuk gives me nothing you guys are okay with random tangents and personal anecdotes.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Ew! Her music has a staff infection! And the mold is radioactive! Welcome to the origin story of that nauseating musical heroine Hurling Gurdy!
It happens, CBH. The bar is set so low in the Funkyverse that a instantly forgettable but relatively inoffensive gag very well might be the highlight of the whole week. Or month. Or year. There have already been TWO individual strips here in 2020 that didn’t immediately make me retch and they ran back-to-back, which is just astonishing. Frankie will volunteer to hand out cups of water at the charity cancer fun run before that happens again.
Two things annoyed me about this one. First, that the anon-o-student is such a disgusting dullard, but that’s commonplace (“These Kids Today Syndrome”). But what really irritates me here is Dinkle’s chin and jaw in panel three. It looks like some sort of seat belt cutter or something. And the pointy nose makes it look like some sort of clamp you’d find in a carpenter’s workshop. Way too angular and exaggerated.
I did like the stink line, though. Nice little touch right there.
Again, this is the work of that nice guy we were talking about earlier in the week? That is a hateful character design. You can just see the contempt the artist has for the subject. Her expression effectively conveys cluelessness about this laughably simple problem. And the rest of her looks like a 34-year-old meth addict.
Hmm…over a period of time something has grown old, putrid and useless, and is the subject of a cheap joke. Seems like as good a metaphor for this strip as anything I could have suggested.
Also applicable to Dinkle, Funky, or Cranky.
I guess she had no problem with the same reed yesterday…which, also guessing, that makes the fungus akin to The Green Slime where it just grows feeding on sunlight…oh, wait, that’s kind of interesting so that can’t be it.
Maybe she’s just stupid and never looked at her reed until just now? Yeah, that’s probably it. Stupid high school students, there’s nothing dumber!
When you think about it the last “kid” characters who had any personality at all were Summer and Cory and neither of those characters has had a single meaningful line of dialog in eight or nine years now. The rest of Summer’s generation were all dolts and morons like Owen and Cody and this current generation is even dumber.
I miss chullo head…
Words you never have thought you would ever hear, part 17.
Now available from Kent State Press.
Yeah, today’s strip isn’t bad. But it was fried caterpillar line that made me laugh.
Let’s play “The Aristocrats.” Everybody, give me your punchline to this setup:
I’ve got one, but I want to hear everyone else’s first.
Dinkle: “Ha, that came out of my cat’s litter box. My turn to pull a prank!”
“Lester had it up his ass.”
Looks like your mouthpiece got an Salivary Transmitted Decay. That’s what you get for swapping with someone in the sax section.
“What do I care? Either I hear some music out of you right now or you’ll finish the school year from the bottom of the pond at band camp.”
“That’s it!! Now which one of you girls hasn’t been practicing proper ‘feminine hygiene'”?
Okay, I have three punchlines I like:
“No, that’s actually the Inedible Pulp.”
“And your hair is turning teal. This concerns you why?”
“How’d that prank work out for you, dumbass?”
Ohhhhh boe!
I saw your post, BC, when I was posting this strip. Great minds, blah blah…