Hello again! I’ve commented in the past about something I call the Comedy Disconnect. The concept is from The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter. I want to promote this to a TBTrope. The book defines this as “trying to be funny rather than communicate ideas. Reality is sacrificed in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs… never sacrifice a character’s reality for the sake of a laugh.”
This happens constantly in the Funkyverse. Let’s start with a recent example from Crankshaft.
If the joke is “Crankshaft doesn’t stop to pick up the kids”, you can’t spend a week on Crankshaft having a polite conversation with the child and her grandmother as he stops to pick them up! Total comedy disconnect. It sacrifices Crankshaft’s reality for the sake of a laugh. (We won’t get into whether these jokes are even any good.)
Our next stop is that awful Skip, the man whole stole a newspaper from its rightful owner (funny how Tom Batiuk can make hedge funds seem like the good guys) and apparently sold shares of it locally. Within two days, Crankshaft was hired as a delivery driver. And delivered a newspaper to the same grandmother-granddaughter team we just saw. Wouldn’t this work better as a joke if Crankshaft blew them off like he (allegedly) blows off bus passengers? Or if he just honored this trait in the first place?
Later we learn that the newspaper hired Lena, baker of the famously awful brownies, as a food columnist. The whole point of the hedge fund story was supposedly to speak “truth to power”, and return the small-town newspaper to people would could run it better. But it’s obvious that Skip is incompetent at running the newspaper. The story is at odds with itself in every direction.
You’ll notice that a lot of this overlaps with If This Is True, What Else Is True? which is another past post I need to promote to a TBTrope. The above definition said “never sacrifice a character’s reality.” The Funkyverse simply has no concept of reality. There are no baseline truths from which comedy can emerge, by building on those truths, or subverting them. Everything is subject to change at all times. Montoni’s is closed. No, wait, it’s open so they can have new cars to drive to Dinkle’s Christmas concert. No, wait, it’s closed again, so Pete can take it over and propose to Mindy, even though Mindy’s been acting engaged for four years and Pete already has a much better job.
This principle also applies to non-comedy situations. Let’s look at one of Les Moore’s most disgusting moments. This is from 2013, and it’s so bad that in 2023, it probably needs a trigger warning. I’m not joking about that. I watch “reddit threads” videos on YouTube, like Mainly Facts. They censor words like “sexual assault”, “suicide”, and “kill”, even when used figuratively. This is much worse. Steel yourself.
How on earth does Les not know about the existence of this journal, if Cayla does? Did she discover it and not bring it up until now? Did she just think it was unimportant? Why is Les just standing there with a dumb look on face as the Rosetta Stone of his life’s work drops into his lap? Delivered by his second wife, who ought to know by now that honoring Lisa is the center of their marriage. If Les had divorced Cayla on the spot, it would have been in character.
But it gets even worse:
This should have inspired the mother of all angry rants from someone in the room.
“You can’t??!! Wait a minute. You didn’t??!! Les, you wrote a book about Lisa’s life. It was published by a professional press. You were paid money to write it. You gloat about it every chance you get. How the hell did you do this without reading her journal, or even knowing it existed?? How does this not completely destroy Lisa’s Story? Was it fiction all along? I’m going to start calling you A Million Little Les, you pathetic hack.”
“We all joined your cockamamie scheme to derail Frankie’s reality show, then the Holy Grail falls into your lap, and you’re too spineless to even read it! Or react to it! Summer, hand me the journal.” (I shove it into Les’ chest) “You’re reading this, or I’m done with you. And everyone else in this room should be done with you too. You want to protect Lisa? Start doing your share of the work, Les. And by the way: don’t passive-aggressive your daughter into reading her mother’s rape journal, you sicko!”
I didn’t mean to turn this into an anti-Les screed, but it’s such a perfect example of how the Funkyverse ignores its own realities. Good comic strips work because they acknowledge their own realities. Charlie Brown and Schroeder and Linus and Marcie can get so mad that they act out-of-character. Peppermint Patty is secretly so insecure that she can have an emotional breakdown about it. And these were some of their best moments! But great moments can’t happen in the Funkyverse. They can’t build on their reality, because over 50 years, Funky Winkerbean never bothered establishing what its reality was. And ignored what little it did establish.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Let History remember–t’was on the 16th day of November, that the phrase most perfect was first e’er spoke:
“A Million Little Les”
Just an FYI, with the Peanuts strips examples, looks like you linked to some thumbnails instead of larger, more readable images, Banana.
I edited the links to make the quality better. Thanks for the heads-up.
This explains why he never bothered to ask who shot John Darling or why. He needed the character to disappear so someone else couldn’t use him and so he was shot out of nowhere for no reason. It irritated him to have to figure out who and why.
I think Batty was afraid the syndicate would find a better cartoonist for the strip.
I admit to being a fan of the strip back in the day. It was a light and fun strip and I liked some of the trivia questions.
I guess the syndicate let him get away with his childish prank for killing the strip. It must be because they thought the strip had no future worth.
That is exactly why. It had lost papers to the point that the value of the property was zilch. If the syndicate thought the comic had ANY chance of ever being continued, they could have simply not let the final strips run. (Or hired someone else to continue the comic, who could simply have John Darling wake up, shake off the awful dream he just had, and carry on from there.)
In fact, no-one was making money off the comic; no-one (including Tom) wanted to continue with it; and the already small contingent of papers that actually carried it was steadily declining. John Darling was a worthless, valueless property.
Tom Batiuk has retconned this into “I showed those syndicate clods who was boss by killing off the lead character so they couldn’t use him!”
I for one would have liked a “John Darling” revival that opens with John waking up hale and hearty in his bed, walking over to the bathroom, opening up the door to the shower, and finding Patrick Duffy scrubbing himself and letting John know his whole “death” was just a dream.
It says a lot about Batiuk that he can’t suggest that the syndicate ordered him to kill the character off so he couldn’t be used again.
At the time, if I recall correctly, I just assumed Les was lying, and had freely plagiarised the diaries. I don’t think I was alone in that assumption. It would fit in with Les’s character as a creepy little shit.
I love these little lessons on the principles of writing and comedy. I knew these things existed, but I have never studied them. But I’m an electrical engineer by day, not a writer. What is Batty’s excuse?
I bet you are a great teacher BJ. Do you teach writing? If not, you should.
Thank you, that’s a very nice compliment. I’m not formally a writing teacher, or a teacher of any kind, but I did often help my classmates with writing projects in my school days. I’ve worked for various software companies where training was part of my job, and I liked doing it. There’s definitely an “English teacher” aspect of my personality.
I also have a lot of opinions about how bad writing instruction usually is. School teaches you all the wrong things. Like petty grammar rules and minimum counts. Don’t get me started on the “ending a sentence with a preposition” thing.
Total agreement about language instruction. Most “grammar nazis” are just parroting stuff they learned from bad elementary school teachers, and in many cases, aren’t even talking about grammar at all.
I agree with you both. I took Spanish in high school for 2 years and never learned anything except how to conjugate verbs.
This year I studied Italian with an instructor and 8 months later I was able to go to Italy and do basic things like order in a restaurant or check in to a hotel, all in Italian.
This was because my teacher focuses on skills for speaking, grammar and trivial exceptions are in the background. Sure you need some grammar, but for some things you just have to be comfortable knowing you will get things wrong, but in most cases you will still be understood and you will receive a gentle correction, and then you WILL remember the correct way. But you have to start speaking with others as soon and as often as possible.
I guess my school experience (back in the ’60s) was a bit different: my freshman (high school) English teacher was an absolute stickler. We had this enormous thick book of Grammar Rules (Warriner’s “English Grammar and Composition”). When my paper (written out longhand, of course) came back, it would be covered with little red numbers indicating which rule I had broken. I then had to look up the rules, correct the paper, and turn it in again.
I hated every minute of this, but that one year so drilled the rules of proper grammar into my head that I never had to consciously think about them again. Instead I can concentrate on what I’m trying to say and let the robot in the back of my brain take care of saying it in proper English. Of course I break rules now and then, but I do so consciously, which is a whole lot different from not knowing how to write a proper sentence, paragraph, essay or book.
I bring this up because (a) I suspect a lot of the people who comment here had a similar experience–this group’s writing is a level above most comments I read online, and (b) I am fascinated by the awful writing I find in Batty’s word Zeppelins. The November 12 “Crankshaft” strip is a fine example: “What was it that I was looking for again?” is not a thing humans say. It reads more like the output from an AI early in its training process. If Ed, and only Ed, spoke like this and did it consistently, I could take it as having meaning (English is not his native language, he’s in early stages of dementia, etc.), but all Batty’s characters speak as if they’re being paid by the word, with a bonus for complexity.
Which brings us back to the topic, almost: there is no consistency; everything is sacrificed to the “joke” of the day. I said “almost” because the tortured English Batty puts in his characters’ mouths rarely actually results in humor. How is “What was it that I was looking for again” any funnier than “What was I looking for”? Indeed, it strikes me as less funny, because the words obscure the point of the joke.
I guess my school experience (back in the ’60s) was a bit different: my freshman (high school) English teacher was an absolute stickler.
I had a high school English teacher like that in the late 80s. Her shtick was “five paragraphs: one to introduce, one each for three main points, then one to conclude.” Every single thing had to be written like that. I quickly learned to do what she wanted, and keep my opinions about writing to myself.
I learned one of the few things high school actually teaches you: how to work under useless bosses and their stupid, pointless rules.
an little edit of today’s Crankshaft strip
Les really missed out on Lisa’s Journal, it was quite the hit with certain audiences…
OK, what Crank is that from? I need context! Also, I love the angry look from Ed as he gets elbowed in the face!! What did he say to cause this? “I’m in a quite funny comic myself!”
“HA! HA! HA!” they laugh in a way no human ever has.
The Crankshaft strip those panels came from was from a June 2013 story arc where Crankshaft made one of his occasional trips to New York City to visit his other daughter, Chris. It ran at pretty much the same time as the Lisa Journal story arc in FW.
That “Crankshaft flys” story arc fortunately did not reach the lows of the June 2008 one, which proved shockingly prescient a year and a half later.
The exodus from the Comics Kingdom continues. ‘The Lockhorns’ is moving to GoComics.
$2.99 a month to subscribe to the CK? I’ll pass.
Been married 36 years (aka 30 of the happiest years of our lives :)) Lockhorns gets it right once in a while
Hooray! I have departed CK after they lowered the “free strips per month” to something like one. The only CK strip I still read is “Prince Valiant,” and I read that on SFgate. Several of the others (BB, H&L, Blondie, etc.) I read on Arcamax, but the low-resolution JPEGs they post make the Sunday “Lockhorns” captions almost impossible to read.
It is more difficult to avoid the “You’ve exceeded your max” message. Clearing browser cookies after every few titles is getting tedious. The going back one day and returning to the current day manuever rarely works anymore. My Tor browser no longer helps to avoid the message.
Over the past couple of weeks, I, too, have started using ArcaMax and The Seattle Times instead of directly from the CK. Some titles, such as the vintage, can only be found on the CK though.
Hello, BJr6K!
Batiuk’s total lack of continuity makes me wonder if he remembers what he had for breakfast.
You have written that Batiuk consistently changes established canon to fit the current story arc. Is that what makes him think he’s a “storyteller.” He’s a storyteller, not an archivist.
Does anyone here read Sluggy Freelance? The cartoonist appears to have an encyclopedic knowledge of his own creation. Most editions of his comic include a pink comment box where he refers back to events in his decades old archive. For free, I might add. He’s the anti-Batiuk.
Sluggy Freelance is created by Pete Abrams. Sorry to omit that info.
Be aware of Eve Hill,
I am always impressed with your vast knowledge of comic strips. Many times, you mention strips that I have no reference to. (I blame it on my lack of education. Sluggy Freelance is no exception. My only connection to webcomics is Pibgorn by Brooke McEldowney. That may not even be a webcomic because I see it is on GoComics. So having never heard of Sluggy, I followed your links and read yesterday’s strip. Fascinating. I would love to play catch up, but seeing it has existed since 1997, I probably will pass, but the story in one strip made me want to know more. Thank you. At the top of his website, there is some green faded lettering, do you know what it says? I am unable to make it out.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and Mr. BWOEH. I hope you get to see your family.
“Monstrous”; it’s the name of the current arc.
Yeah, that’s a problem with Sluggy; it’s good, but it has a LOT of story, some of it quite dense. Just trying to explain who the characters are would be quite involved. (And, to be honest, some of the chapters would be something of a slog to get through if you were to start reading now, like “Oceans Unmoving”.)
Unfortunately, that’s a problem with a lot of long-running story-based webcomics; they tend to be a lot more continuity-driven than traditional newspaper comic strips (even the story-driven ones tend to revert to a standard spot between arcs, whereas webcomics are more likely to allow for actual change), so it’s harder to jump in at a random point, and getting through the archives is a real commitment. They can be worth it, but it’s a hard sell.
Thank you, Green Luthor.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
It’s hard to believe that it has been 11 months since FW cancellation. Of course with so many crossovers, it has been like FW never left. We will see if the worst of the lot appear in December. I predict we will see them (shudder!) at the grand opening of Montoni’s. That is if TB has not already forgotten about it. 😎
Oh, that’s why I tried Sluggy and found it too confusing. Odd, as I think I started reading Girl Genius around the same time. I dedicated a week’s vacation with a tab open to it to read it from the beginning. It actually took longer than 9 days of vacay to catch up. How old is it? It’s Steampunk! (Remember Steampunk?) It just passed its 21st anniversary.
I sill can get baffled by the plots occasionally. You nitpickers might like it–smart, clever writing and great work by the artists (yes, it’s a webcomic with an inker and a penciller!) If curious, it updates M-W-F, so just check it after you read Dinosaur Comics those days.
Girl Genius is a bit of an anomaly in the webcomic world, in that it actually started out as a print comic but moved to web publishing after a few years; it’s still produced the same way it was as a print comic, though. Also, while most webcomics were amateur productions (not in a derogatory way), with some creators (like Dinosaur Comics‘ Ryan North) later getting work for professional publishers, Girl Genius was created by established professional creators from the start; Phil Foglio has been working professionally since around 1980, when he did a regular comic for TSR’s Dragon Magazine, and both he and his wife Kaja (his co-creator on Girl Genius) did art for some of the earliest Magic: The Gathering sets (circa 1993). (Kaja’s cards include “Shahrazad”, a card that was banned from tournament play not for being too powerful, but for being too damn annoying to play. That isn’t really relevant, though.)
Good comic, though, highly recommended if you can sit through the entire archive. (But, again, LOTS of story going on there.)
It pays to have a brother who is also very into comics. He’s into it way more than me. He’ll find a comic and say, “Hey, check this one out.” Many of the comic strip titles I follow were his recommendations. He also the one responsible for getting me into snarking on Funky Winkerbean. A family that snarks together, stays together.
Sluggy started a new chapter this week. For what it’s worth, I started reading on a new chapter, and the references helped me catch up and understand the story. It’s amazing how much Pete Abrms’s art has improved over the years. Since it’s a webcomic, the strip can have an irregular schedule, which can be a little off-putting.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and Mrs. SP. We’re celebrating Thanksgiving over at a friend’s home. My son’s family will be celebrating Christmas at our home again this year. YaY!
YaY!
The problem is that Batiuk doesn’t understand that what might fly in the material he was cribbing from won’t work in any other setting. Archie might be a completely different vanilla protagonist each time he appears but that’s okay because he’s not really a character…..he’s a plot device. To have people change who and what they are to make a joke work isn’t actually storytelling..
Ugh, the secret diary of Lisa Moore. I remember that. For a brief, shining moment, it appeared that maybe BatYam had finally at long last left Lisa and the cancer book behind. Then BAM, he pulls out a secret Lisa diary, like a spin kick to the forehead. Every nook, cranny and crawl space in that house was jammed to the hilt with Lisa detritus…diaries, VHS tapes, ghosts, you name it. Easily one of Act III’s most repugnant moments.
I never got the whole Les/Cayla marriage thing. Beyond the “Maybe THIS will get me a Pulitzer!” choosy-beggar aspect. “Why yes, Husband! I support your obsession with your dead wife, who is dead. Being eaten by worms. The worms wriggle in, the worms wriggle out, the worms play pinochle on her snout! I will stay in our loveless marriage–wait, loveless? Too weak a word. Highly resentful marriage based on mutual self-loathing? By the way, in the crawlspace where I found Lisa’s [Cayla’s heavy lidded look “Of course he has these”] DIARIES, I also found this tibia of an adult woman with teeth marks on her bones. Want to see?” LES: “I can’t–I’m stuffed already!” (burps)
No reason for this smart, accomplished, hot woman to be involved with this…apparent chick magnet, whining, self-absorbed loser. But–he’s TOM! All the chicks melt for the great taste of TOM!
Also, the Crank strip about underwear is actually funny! The “HA! HA!” strip–was the joke that it was ironic that this then merely 89 year old beanbag with glasses who thinks he’s being funny gets laughed at because he’s a jerk? Also, great to know that Crank hasn’t changed his clothes ever. Sorry, but it may take days for you to forget this question: Crimeny, can you imagine what Crank smells like?! I’d guess “Old man smell with unwashed clothes that he regularly shovels manure in”.
CS, 11/19/23:
Five panels to tell a one panel Lockhorns joke from 1989.
(Tom high-fives himself, “YEAHHH! I’m Hemingway in a toolshed!”)
Why is Batiuk running a strip about cleaning up Thanksgiving cookware four days before Thanksgiving? Are we skipping over the dinner entirely this week for more newspaper distribution gags? Does Pmm cook up her family feast in advance so that she and Jff can watch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers game? Will next Sunday’s strip be a standalone yokker that could have run on the 19th? Did the family have their turkey feast early so that they could all go the grand re-opening of Mopey Pete’s Montoni’s Pizza (hey, it works for Ruth’s Chris Steak House) on Thursday? And why is Ed standing there making muddled aphorisms instead of helping his daughter with the dishes? Enquiring minds want to know!
Yeah, was hoping to see Rana show up again for dinner at Dinkle’s.
On one hand, I look to old Nemo In Slumberland or Gasoline Alley entries for Sundays where the entirety of a page was the canvas for one strip. An entire newspaper page. Such a vast canvas to allow so much imaginative expression.
Then that comes down to Batiuk’s treatment of Sunday strips for a long time, which is to either tell a 3 panel joke in 5 panels, or to put it all to one single image (sideways or not). That FW single Sunday image of the optometrist office was stuffed with detail, and that was good. Comic book wankery and today’s entry are not.
“It’s just a comic strip” they all say in response regardless, so honestly, nobody cares on both sides of this equation. I still think it to be a sad erosion.
Pffffttt
Amazing.
Doesn’t she moonlight at Centerville Banking and Loan?
COMPLETELY off topic, but seems like it might be relevant to your interests, at least for 4.2 minutes:
Star Wars Christmas Parade “Hologram! NOW!!”
Not relevant to said interests? THEN DON’T READ IT! And I bet you’ve never even been married!
Ummm…re-reads The Rules: “Stay ‘on-topic’…” Umm.
WordPress needs a “delete post” button. Give me a break, I’ve only been here a year!
I’m not sure this actually goes against Les’s character. The diary covers Lisa’s ‘relationship’ (single date?) with Frankie and the subsequent pregnancy. I may be wrong, but weren’t Les’s Lisa books all about HIS relationship with her? I don’t think he wrote about Lisa’s own childhood, her estrangement from her parents, whatever involvement Frankie had with her during and post-pregnancy (I think there was a strip or two where he was drinking and refused to drive her to the hospital?).
Les wrote about what Lisa meant to him and how he lost her. Not about anything outside that. So why would he read any of her diaries that weren’t written during their marriage? Even if they covered Les attending pre-natal sessions with her (which I think he did), her tone might have been insufficiently worshipful so early on. Maybe she still had feelings for Frankie – could Les have borne that?
weren’t Les’s Lisa books all about HIS relationship with her?
Who knows, really? The title Lisa’s Story is the only detail we were ever given about the actual content of these books. So I don’t think we can give Les the benefit of the doubt, that the incident was out of scope for the book. That also wasn’t his stated reason for not reading it; he just said he couldn’t.
Even if we could give that a pass, Les should still want to read the diary, because it’s a primary source. And, being a general personal diary, it could contain information about almost anything in Lisa’s life. Which means it could still have research value, beyond the account of the Frankie incident. Les’ disinterest in this gold mine of new information about Lisa reflects very poorly on his honesty and competence as a non-fiction writer.
It also supports what I tend to believe about Les. He’s not protecting Lisa’s legacy; he’s controlling Lisa’s legacy, like he has something to hide about the whole story. (And that’s the more charitable version.)