Maxine of Arc
August 3, 2022 at 9:35 am
Everybody in this room, not just the poor bastard who has to try to facilitate this meeting, now HATES THIS GUY. And they should.
Everybody in the room needs to come to the poor bastard’s defense. Seminar Guy is desperately tries to engage with anyone here whose name is not Funky Winkerbean, but he’s the only one with his hand raised. As cringe-y as this week has been to date, at least today’s gag logically follows yesterday’s “fetching pails of water” riff and, at least for me, almost elicits a chuckle. But Funky’s expression is earnest as he delivers his jerky response. Is he being serious now? Funky’s wizened mug takes on the same stricken expression he wore when the Winkerbeans last discussed estate planning five years ago.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Funky speaks with the serene confidence of an idiot who expects to die before estate planning can matter to him. I hope that’s a sign of things to come.
The worst part is that Funky’s answer is incorrect. The logic behind Jack going into the home first is that Jill comes “tumbling after”. Sheesh. These are 3rd grade standardized test questions, Funky.
I find the gags of Funky being a jerk are Mr. Batiuk at his worst. The Les strips are nauseating. Dinkle strips are exhausting. Yet Funky as a smart aleck just make me angry. Mostly, Tom wants you to smirk along and groan, but here he actually thinks he is being funny. He ain’t. It is degrading. I notice that Tom does not allow comments on his website. Why? Because that behavior is never funny in real life. I say, I get angry, but not like be ware of Eve hill angry. Wow! That was quite a display yesterday. Opening sentence angry. It was magnificent!
🤭Oops, sorry. Never let it be said that Batty can’t get a rise out of me.
In Act III, Batty destroys all the once-likeable characters. It bugs me.
Batty: You like Funky as a character? Ha! Get a load of this. He’s a childish, whiny jerk now. What, you like Bull? How did that happen? You’re not supposed to like him. Guess what? I’m killing him off. He’s dead. You guys like Crazy Harry? I stopped making him funny. Crazy Harry is just plain weird now.
Why don’t you guys like Les?
Act II Funky was saddled with misfortune and may not have been entirely likeable, but at least his every appearance in the strip wasn’t met with dread.
Maybe just maybe that’s not really Funky there after all. I have a feeling that Daddy Mort got the hots for Holly and impersonates her husband from time to time these past few years.
I admit, I liked the old Les. He was more…down to earth, maybe? I don’t know.
Act III Les, however, is an abomination.
No Les? No Dinkle? No Lisa bereaving? No problem! Batdick has endless ways to torture us.
This is starting to remind me of an episode where the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” gang attend some kind of sensitivity seminar. Thing is, though, that episode was, you know, funny.
His facial expression makes it tough to ascertain whether he’s still being a dick or if he’s just an imbecile. Either way, we all lose. This is wastebasket-quality material right here. I mean, he’s riffing on “Jack And Jill” here, which totally redefines “lame”.
Funky’s comment is so asinine that Cap’n Whitebeard (sitting just behind and to Funky’s left) appears to have spontaneously sprouted a crop of blonde hair. For what reason, I don’t know — but it serves him right for passing up the golden opportunity to speak and thereby prevent Funky from doing so.
_______
Sometimes people post cool ‘remixes’ of FW comics, or other visuals. If I had such a thing to share, what’s the procedure for doing so?
Hey, Y. Knott! Image posts and strip remixes are welcome here. An easy way to post is to firs upload your image to imgur.com. Once the image upload is complete, instead of copying imgur’s link, right click your image and select Copy Image Address. Pasting that link in the Comment window here (html tags are optional in most cases) should do the trick.
Thanks! I appreciate the instructions. I’ll have an image to post soon … looking forward to trying it and seeing how it goes!
Just to piggy-back on comments that have already appeared – I’m mystified that TomBa finds any of this mildly amusing, let alone that it comes anywhere near the level of funny. He has scraped through the bottom of the barrel, through the surface of the ground beneath, and is now digging feverishly through the earth’s crust toward the mantle and the outer and inner core. With any luck an upwelling of magma will inundate the seminar beginning on Friday and culminate in an appropriate single panel color strip of devastated Westview on Sunday.
I don’t know why Batiuk decided Funky should be Diet Crankshaft: all the dickery with none of the flavor…
But I wish he would stop.
“Diet Crankshaft”… (shudder). This is way, way too accurate.
Act III’s beginning re-introduced Funky as a crabby, sarcastic, workaholic guy who made bad wisecracks. But after a series of traumatic events, and his car accident, and Cory leaving home, he started to work out more and seemed to mellow out. But now that there’s nothing going on, it’s time for TB to bring back long-abandoned character traits again. Just like how Bull was a bully, and then really wasn’t a bully all along, but then was actually a bully after all, et cetera…
It’s like he learned nothing by going into a coma and traveling backwards in time.
This strip would be funny if, in the middle panel, the word balloons were filled with Pew! and Pew!
This is what happens when you don’t deal with a heckler. The heckler is now running the meeting. No one else wants to speak out because their comment will be turned into a stupid joke. Funky’s intimidated everyone else into silence, and the speaker is now deferring to him. Everyone has long since given up on the idea of learning anything about estate planning. I’m surprised people aren’t walking out. Would you trust your financial future to someone as passive and inept as this?
For a guy who hates the Internet, Tom Batiuk demonstrates a good understanding of how trolling works.
The Ben Stein reference (that I “got!”) in panel 2 could have led to a Ferris Bueller gag in the third panel, like “Bueller’s not here!” That would still have been an jerkish heckle to a nice and harmless man, but it would have been funny.
When did Walt teleport in there?
This situation would be real easy to deal with, too. Don’t try to humiliate the heckler: he’s impervious to that.
Humiliate his wife. This was another thing I learned in comedy heckler class. If you want to really stick the screws to a heckler, any woman he’s with can make him suffer a lot more than you can.
If you’ve escalated properly, it’s now time to throw Funky out of the meeting. If Holly starts to get up to go with him, you say “Ma’am, you can stay if you wish to.” Force her to make a difficult, embarrassing choice with the whole room glaring at her.
Holly’s reacting appropriately, but not correctly. The CORRECT response would be to elbow him in the ribs and tell him to shut the hell up and quit embarrassing the both of you. But no, this is a showcase for Funky’s “wit” and so we all have to sit through it and so does the increasingly uncomfortable room.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, the German word that encapsulates the feeling of vicarious or secondhand embarrassment is “Fremdschämen.”
“Fremdschamen” is what you get when you can’t have “schadenfreude,” I guess.
Miss Dejardin laughed when the blood fell on Carrie White in Stephen King’s novel.
I blame Holly… She not only dragged Funkman to this seminar knowing full well that he’d act the fool, she also hasn’t had the common sense to drag his ass out for the courtesy of the audience…
Funkman strikes me as the type of asshole who yelled his own “commentary” at the screen in movie theaters
Yes, she should be trying to stop this clownshow, too. But as ED said, it’s all solipsism. Funky Winkerbean has no theory of mind. Holly, the speaker, and other attendees are powerless to stop this. They can only silently fume, because they’re just props in Funky’s I’m-so-witty fantasy. Reminds me of this:
The best thing about that clip is that someone troubled to include caricatures of Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman (from the back!) and at least a couple more I’m missing (is that Bennett Cerf?)
TFHackett, thanks for creating the ‘2017: Funky and Holly Estate Planning, Take 1‘ page. I seem to have purged that week from my memory.
Other than the vertical panel, Funky appears to be more addled than snarky.
(phone rings)
Financial Planner: Hello?
Westview Police: We seem to be missing our village idiot. He was supposed to be sitting on the city welcome sign, mocking traffic. Have you seen him? He goes by the name Funky Winkerbean?
Perhaps Funky was frustrated because he wasn’t getting a reaction from the financial planner.
Out of curiosity, I reread the strips from around that period. For more than a month, Funky acted like a complete jerk. That period includes the infamous trip to the Dallas Super Clinic for their physicals.
Last panel, Feb. 03, 2017
Doctor: (to Holly) Is he always a jerk like this?
Holly: (looking embarrassed) Pretty much.
In the middle of the month, Funky decided to be a smartass to an Ohio BMV worker. Funky ticked off the wrong guy. 🤣
(forming an “L” on my forehead with thumb and index finger)
Loooooooooooser!
The 2017 arc is far superior. While the jokes all revolve around Funky having to hold the unrealistic idiot ball, that sort of stuff used to be Funkyverse bread and butter.
It’s not great, but having Funky derailing the conversation by wondering what he died of and if people showed up to his funeral is at least recognizable as a type of humor.
I’ll agree. The 2017 estate planning story arc is better (it didn’t upset me).
That entire month had story arcs that were much better than anything we’ve read over the past couple of years. The Funky renews his driver’s license arc is worth the price of admission. 😂
Proof positive that Funky Winkerbean is in a death spiral.
Cheers
The maddening thing is, there’s actually a germ of an idea here. The speaker is *terrible*. If I went to an estate planning seminar and he started out with a sustained “Jack and Jill” metaphor, I’d be steamed, too. He sucks. But that’s one strip, and one remark you mutter to your wife under your breath. Then leave early and you’re off to…well, what about going around town and getting financial advice from everyone – Crazy Larry, Dinkle, that woman who got arrested by INS…hell, call Montoni in Florida – you get a gag a day…I dunno. FW is at its most aggravating when you can see something or other that could possibly work…and then TB’s first draft takes up an entire week of strips. This is the comic strip equivalent of, well, being stuck in a Ramada Inn conference room with a boring investment advisor. Hm. I guess this really is a “quarter inch from reality.”