It’s The Thought That Counts

Have you ever gotten a self-serving holiday or birthday gift? Like, a starter package for a pyramid scheme, from a pushy friend who’s been trying to recruit you for months? Or an accessory for a device you don’t have, from someone who has it, and wants you to get interested in it? Or a donation in your name, to a cause they support but you don’t?

That’s exactly what this arc feels like.

First, let’s keep in mind how bonkers this story already is. The plot mechanism is “Pam damaged Jeff’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt,” which, again, is a plot borrowed from media for pre-schoolers. Replacing it might have cost $50 total, including international shipping. Instead, Pam took the grandiose step of buying two tickets to a Blue Bombers football game, without even asking anyone if they wanted to go a game.

A game in Winnipeg. Which is almost 1000 air miles away from Cleveland. Toronto is only 300 miles from Cleveland by car, would have been a much better tourism destination, and every CFL team plays a game there every season.

Pam’s “gift” of a $50 football ticket obligated its recipients to spend well over $1,000 each. The flight from Cleveland to Winnipeg starts at $650. Plus taxes, fees, hotel, meals, ground transportation, and border crossing costs. Updating passports, if you need to do this, is also expensive and time-consuming.

So who paid all these add-on expenses? And why?

  • Jeff paid the trip expenses, because he’s the only one with a real job. This would make basic sense. Crankshaft has a job, but I doubt it pays much. And it obligates Jeff to spend money he may not wish to or be able to.
  • Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because somehow he is independently wealthy. This would explain a lot. I’ve long wondered how Ed is able to buy gobs of stupid crap online, while the family shrugs off the massive property damage he causes. There are real-life stories of janitors and teachers who built impressive savings accounts over their long lives. Crankshaft doesn’t seem the frugal type, but time is on his side. A penny saved in 1940 (when he was already an adult) would be worth $3.17 in 2024 according to online inflation calculators.
  • Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because he’s the grownup. This would be consistent with how parent-child relationships work in the Funkyverse. Children are treated as subservient wards even when they’re in their 70s. Witness the Funky Winkerbean storyline where Holly’s mother bullies her into doing a cheerleading show where she gets seriously injured, and has to be treated a time when the family is doing home renovations, and Montoni’s is failing. Nobody ever says a word about this.
  • Pam also paid for the trip expenses, as part of the gift. This would fit Batiuk’s overarching theme of a mother wife doing having to pay penance for destroying the child husband’s special fandom object. But how does Pam have this kind of spare money lying around?
  • Pam paid the trip expenses, to force Jeff and Ed to get along better. This theory would address a long-ignored problem in the Funkyverse: Jeff and Ed should hate each other. They’re not blood relatives; they’re in-laws.

    Ed’s shenanigans – which includes water damage to Jeff’s precious comic books – have done infinitely more damage to Jeff than one ruined t-shirt. Jeff is long overdue to give Ed a The Reason You Suck Speech that would push the one from Family Guy into second place.
The joke is that Quagmire’s many criticisms of Brian are all 100% canonical.

Ed wouldn’t like Jeff either, because Ed is needy of attention, and he would see his child’s spouse as a competitor for it. Fortunately, the Funkyverse is very asexual, sparing us from a Wilbur and Dawn Weston situation.

But let’s lighten up. These two disparate, unfriendly men traveling together for a common purpose should be rife with comedic possibilities. Planes Trains and Automobiles, the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the original Toy Story, and family movies like Step-Brothers, mined gold from such a premise. But unfortunately, the Funkyverse is also very conflict-averse.

Instead, we’ve gotten one week on the mechanisms of appeasing a toddler, and a week on the banalities of air travel. At least Jeff’s puke-inducing Inner Child hasn’t shown up yet. But he still might.

The last possible explanation:

  • Pam wants to get both Jeff and Ed out of her life for a few days. As much as Jeff should be a tightly wound ball of hatred, Pam should be far, far worse. She’s forced to constantly indulge two idiot manchildren and their consumptive, destructive ways. Any woman would have left both of them decades ago.

    This could be a fun twist. It’d be nice to see the story cut to Pam enjoying a day of peace and quiet in the house, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that would be justified for once. But Pam is a woman, and the Funkyverse is very disinterested in women.

    But why else would she buy Ed a ticket, when he wasn’t the aggrieved party?

Unknown's avatar

Author: Banana Jr. 6000

Yuck. The fritos are antiquated.

74 thoughts on “It’s The Thought That Counts”

  1. Thought and Batiuk are hostile strangers. He doesn’t realise that the whole bloody thing reminds us that he is that dough headed inner child that almost got Jeff killed. He’s asking “Can I go to a football game in freaking WINNIPEG?” and whining about being bullied when every Canadian ever asks “I don’t know…..can you?” right the heck back.

  2. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 13 of Canadian Football League Storyline

    It won’t be long until Manitoba gets sick and tired of Crankshit and Whiny Manbaby Jfff

  3. As for his fear of female agency, the same impulse that makes him avoid seeing how appalling it is that Jeff’s eight year old self would waste away and die of despair because a funny book was late blinds him to the realization that only a repellent and spoiled little creep thinks his mommy’s sole function was to wait on him hand and foot as he got his monthly fix of brain rot. If he’s the deluded ass Wertham thought sheeple like him are, he’d not only have to apologize to the mother he maligns, he’d have to admit the only enemy he has is Tom Batiuk.

  4. One of my comments on the August 3, 2025, Crankshaft strip allegedly violated GoComics comment policy and was removed. I am confused as to which part. I thought I would ask the rational, intelligent people here on SoSF for their opinion.

    Gird your loins, here’s the offending post: 😱

    It can’t be because I referred to Jeff as “noodly”, because I borrowed the term from another commenter who has been using that descriptor for several days.

    Is it because I compared Jeff to a speed bump?

    Is it because I made a play on words of the movie title, When Harry Met Sally?

    Is it because I besmirched the Hallmark Movie Channel, and/or David Lynch by associating them with today’s lame-o Crankshaft comic strip?

    Anyone see the part of the comment that violated GoComics comment policy?

    • It’s not spam.
    • No insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language and threats of any kind.
    • No attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article’s author.

    🤷‍♀️

    In the comment section of every GoComic strip I read yesterday, some clown🤡 bitched, in all caps, that they couldn’t post comments on Alley Oop. No one can. The cartoonist turned off the comments. Why was that tolerated? Seemed like spam to me.

    Sometimes I wonder what planet the GoComics moderators are from.😂

    Most of this post is venting. A lot of it is snark. It would be kind of ironic, but I will understand if this post is deleted for violating SoSF policy.🤦‍♀️

    1. I apologize for airing dirty GoComics laundry on Son of Stuck Funky space. I was hoping someone could offer some insight.

      1. You can’t trust those poorly-moderated comics page comment sections. They’re slipshod, and second-rate, and I look down upon them as smugly as Les Moore looks at his fans at a book signing. There’s no rhyme or reason behind their standards, if they even have any. I tend to frown on comment section cross-pollination, but it’s not egregious or anything, plus it kind of serves to prove my point, too. So I shall allow this, he said, smugly.

        1. I’ve had a comment, or two, deleted from the Son of Stuck Funky before. Actually, the whole comment subthread was removed. I knew it had been removed because I could no longer see it. And I was told why.

          GoComics has a peculiar policy where the person posting the comment never sees anything unusual. They believe their comment was posted without issue. They believe the comment is there for everyone to see, even after the moderator comes along later and flags it for violating policy.

          There is nothing in my GoComics comment history indicating the comment was “removed” or “flagged”.

          Meanwhile, a friend texted me wondering what I had posted that required the removal of the comment. Instead of my comment, they see, as does everyone else, the phrase “This comment violated our policy”. If they hadn’t contacted me, I would never have known my comment violated GoComics policy.

          How is somebody supposed to know they violated website policy if there is no indication they’ve run afoul of it? Shouldn’t the violator see the removal message too, so they know what not to post the next time? It’s pointless.

    2. Homophobic comments are specifically forbidden in the comment policy, so I’m guessing they interpreted it as homophobic. Or at least that was a good enough excuse for someone to delete it. Another poster used the word “bromance”, and that one has survived for 3 hours.

      1. That makes more sense than anything I’ve been able to come up with, though it seems awfully nitpicky. It’s not like I used a homophobic slur against another commenter or the cartoonist. It was more of a jest in the spirit of somebody jokingly shouting, “Get a room!” I sure hope I didn’t hurt Ed’s or Jeff’s feelings by suggesting their relationship was anything other than father-in-law/son-in-law. /s

        GoComics doesn’t feature any comics featuring gay characters? Hi, Jane’s World.👋

        Perhaps I should be grateful that only my comment was deleted. According to the GoComics policy, my account might have been blocked.

        Meanwhile, a perverted abomination like 9 Chickweed Lane gets a pass

        Thanks for the reply, Banana. I appreciate it. 🤟

        1. It’s my best guess. As ED said, the standards of Internet forum comments are somewhere between non-existent and selectively enforced.

          1. I see the violation notice at least once a day in the discussion of other comic strips. It makes me wonder how many of those comments were less offensive than mine.

            Perhaps the moderators (a.k.a. desk monkeys) pick a comment at random and flag it to justify their existence. Do they have a quota?

            Yesterday was my turn to draw the short straw.

    3. Stephen King once likened the content moderators of the world to a spayed tomcat. Watching the ban-hammer happy in action makes me see why.

      1. The moderator’s choice of comments to remove appears to be as accurate as a spraying tomcat.

        Unless you use a different profile name, as far as I know, I’ve never seen you post on GoComics Crankshaft. Is that because of the moderators?

    4. The motives of the auto-moderator are mysterious. Those of the human moderator are completely inscrutable.

      By the way, I’ve been calling him noodly Jeff for years

      1. Yeah, it was you I borrowed “noodly” from.😊 That’s because the auto-moderator (a.k.a. nannybot) does not approve of “wuss” or “wimp”.

        A commenter once advised that to figure out what threshold an auto-moderator uses, think like a third-grader.

        On the old GoComics website, if you entered an unapproved word, the auto-moderator wouldn’t let you post the comment until you changed or removed the offending term. With the new GoComics your post appears to go up, but other readers never see it. I can see the post, but it is instantly removed from, or never reaches the view of other readers. It’s gutless.

        The Comics Kingdom also uses the craptacular OpenWeb commenting platform. Is the comment moderation on the Comics Kingdom handled similarly to GoComics? I’ve only commented 74 times in the almost three years since the “upgrade”. Yeah, I’m still bitter about the removal of Disqus.

  5. Today’s Past Batiukverse Storylines: Les Returns to Work After Summer is Born and Kara Milstrom’s First Week At Westview High

    Les: NO NO NO NO PLEASE NO! NOOOOOOOO!

    Take away panels 2 and 3 of this strip it becomes very tragic (I think)

    The punchline here is that Kara keeps getting sent to the principal’s office because she was mistaken for a student when she’s actually a teacher

    Ha ha it’s funny because somebody (I think it was Dinkle) slipped a adult magazine into Kara’s score

    Dinkle: I’m not calling you a good girl, Kara. That halftime performance was FUCKING SHIT!

    Kara: “sob”

    1. That “MY BABY IS DEAD?” fake-out bit is just heinous. BatHam was a total madman during Act II.

      1. He does it twice in 3 days too. Well, Act II’s misery was at least briskly-paced…

        1. Act III was so glacially-paced, and so instantly forgettable, it’s easy to forget how batshit insane Act II was at times. It’s just so unbelievably shameless. Even one “MY BABY IS DEAD??” gag would be one too many for 98% of comic strip authors. I’m assuming For Better Or For Worse did it too, of course, unless that lunatic opted to kill another dog instead. Thank God the two of them never joined forces, for that, we can all be grateful. It’d have been a bloodbath, at best.

          1. I don’t think Batiuk would ever have killed Lisa if his editor hadn’t died. People with Stage 4 any kind of cancer are done in a few months. Especially when they go untreated for a long time, because the hospital screwed up their diagnosis.

          2. I don’t think Batiuk would ever have killed Lisa if his editor hadn’t died. People with Stage 4 any kind of cancer are done in a few months. Especially when they go untreated for a long time, because the hospital screwed up their diagnosis.

          3. I don’t think Batiuk would ever have killed Lisa if his editor hadn’t died. People with Stage 4 any kind of cancer are done in a few months. Especially when they go untreated for a long time, because the hospital screwed up their diagnosis.

    2. If Batiuk had brains, he’d do something about Dawson casting and why it trips people up.

      1. Batiuk doesn’t have enough brains or curiosity to learn what Dawson Casting is.

    3. Don’t get too comfortable, Les. One of those two people is still going to die horribly.

      1. Why stop at one? As long as TB retains a contract for at least one strip, there’s always hope.

    4. Regarding the Playgirl joke: did this even fly in 2002? I just took my company’s sexual harassment training last week, where I learned that sticking a nudie mag in someone’s paperwork is a type of sexual harassment now. And I went to college in the 1990s, when there were all kinds of people making us aware of the overall concept.

      1. And I overlooked the fact that the magazine was placed there by presumably underage high school children, which makes it worse. This certainly would not have flown in my public high school in the late 80s.

  6. Day 14: “Can I eat Canadian bar food?”
    This tells me that Day 15 will be “Can I eat a Canadian chocolate bar/ Canadian flavor of potato chips?” like his mommy is gonna stop him.

  7. Sigh, I knew Batty would comment on poutine. Since my grandfather was a Montrealer, I must remind Batty of poutine’s origins in Quebec. Never would I consider eating this outside of that province. Yes Batty, if I have to listen to all of your petty grievances, then you must indulge mine!

    1. He always latches on to the most banal things, doesn’t he? Yesterday he showed off Winnipeg landmarks, so Crankshaft could repeat a joke from 16 years ago.

    2. Red Green compared it to a heart attack on a plate. Considering it’s Red Green saying it, there are issues.

        1. The cheese curds add in a gooeyness that regular fries and gravy lack. If that’s not your thing, you’re not going to like it. Ah, well….the Dutch put mayonnaise on fries and gravy so we’re not as artery clogging.

          1. Ah, I forgot the cheese curds. But still, this three-part combination is not inconsistent with American dietary standards.

          2. And it could just as well been invented in Wisconsin and been called something else.

      2. I think it is overrated and I rarely eat it. When I’m in Quebec it’s French food for me!

    3. I’ve been busy this week dropping AC units on and training dogs to attack Mary Worth but popped in to see how things are going. Apparently a recent strip’s highlight was Ed sampling poutine at the Blue Bombers game. Well, I decided to go to the team’s website to see if they actually sell the Canadian delicacy, and they do indeed.

      FYI, if you visit the Poutinerie in section 134, you can gorge yourself on traditional poutine for $12 Canadian, or splurge on the buffalo chicken or pulled pork varieties for $16. Sounds like a deal to me.

      See you all in a week or so.

  8. Today’s Cranskhaft

    Day 14 of Canadian Football Week

    I bet that Crankshaft’s gonna rush to the bathroom after eating the poutine, only to walk into the bleachers for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers

    1. Probably…. mostly because he can’t figure out where English borrowed the word toilet from.

  9. So, uh, Tom has posted two John Darling strips on his blog.

    I, um, don’t know how to put this, but…what in the world is going on with John’s pants? (Or possibly long underwear?)

  10. I wouldn’t dare try to post this on the other discussion.

    From the Department of ‘What If Batty Had a Sense of Humor’:

    Ed and Jeff the Wuss return home to discover Jeffy’s belongings scattered all over the front lawn.

    Jeff the Wuss: What did you say to Pam about our trip? WHAT DID YOU TELL HER?!!

    Crankshaft: I told her we had poontang while we were in Winnipeg?

    Jeff the Wuss: You idiot! We had poutine!

    1. Oh, dadgummit. I forgot. If this post violates the site’s NSFW rule, please remove it.

      1. Naw, NSFW means something you’d feel uncomfortable watching/reading aloud with your inlaws in the room.

        Not a PG-13 level bit of hilarious wordplay!

    2. “Poontang” – now there’s a perfectly cromulent word that I haven’t heard in a long time.

    4. My theater-major college roommate had a particularly enthusiastic professor who tried to inculcate into her students a an appreciation for English words based solely on their sounds. Her example that day was a word she had just learned: “poontang.” As in, “just listen to the sound of those vowels and that digraph – POON-TAANNG!”

      And yes, she knew what it meant – that was the point. Try listening for sound, not meaning. To this day whenever I see that word (as noted above, not too often of late) I hear “POOON-TAAANNNNNG!”

    5. Today’s strip: I saw the “TOILETTES” sign and assumed it would lead to the obvious joke, “I guess the men’s rooms must be this way.” Which isn’t exactly George S. Kaufman, but is at least a joke that fits the character and would have achieved the same result. As opposed to….sigh.

      1. Of course it’s the same stupid joke we’d get if the great big sign said Gents.

        1. Cranky: “Everyone knows I’m no gentleman. Anyone know where the ‘Disgruntled Pyromanics’ room is?”

  11. Day 25: Can I point out that signage would be in both official languages? No because it’s funny making my title character into an idiot being bullied by people who don’t talk Murrcan despite us saving the world…..by being Josef Stalin’s gun shop.

        1. Cool! I’m delighted that we get a non-US audience, because I don’t think the Funkyverse does.

        1. One downvote could be a misclick. It happens. But yeah, it’s a perfectly valid observation.

  12. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 15 of Canadian Football Storyline

    I guess Crankshaft is gonna walk into a locker room and get jumped by every single one of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers

  13. Day 16: Can I set up a contrived plot line that has a misanthropic imbecile disrupt a football game in a foreign country?

  14. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 16 of Canadian Football Storyline

    Why isn’t it Jack Doherty (disgraced American streamer on Kick who treated everyone around him like shit and had his guards who are at least twice his size, he got banned from the site for crashing his car and not giving a shit about his cameraman who was injured, instead opting his “friend” to film him being in shock over his car) or even Johnny Somali (real name Ramsey Khalid Isamel, also another disgraced American streamer on Kick who became infamous for going around the world and behaving like a asshole in the countries he was in and getting his ass rightfully beat for it) who’s getting trampled by the Blue Bombers as well as Crankshaft?

    1. And why will nobody call Crankshaft out on being a destructive dumbbell? Sadly, I know the answer: storming Omaha Beach is a lifetime Do Whatever You Want To Do And Everyone Else Has To Take It pass. The Bombers have to bow down and kiss his withered arse because D-Day….never once admitting that the Yanks came in late both wars.

      1. Even if Crankshaft single-handedly won World War II, the fact that his barbecue antics literally doomed the planet (May 5, 2023) should have overruled that. Never mind his ‘opening the plane door midflight’ incident. And the 26,000 other ways he’s broken social norms.

        1. I know that. I also know that Crazy Little Boy Author is too daddy worshipping to want to know that. Telling Ed off means wanting Hitler to win because that’s probably how Batiuk père kept Batiuk fils in line.

  15. Day 17: In reality, Jeff and Ed would get “bulled” by Canadian law enforcement when Ed gets hauled off to the jail cell he should have been put in when he opened the airplane door. Here, we get jackassery.

  16. Also, the idea of accountability for being stupid and destructive is a mother’s idea of what’s right.

  17. The fact that ‘Shaft, a relatively heavyset WWII veteran, can outrun the Blue Bomber football players, even if just out of the tunnel, surely does not bode well for the Winnipeg side in this upcoming game.

    1. To be fair, I think Ed had a head start, but it’s still pretty insulting. Ctankshaft is is a 106-year old man who should barely be able to move, and the Winnipeg players are at least high-level NCAA football players.

      Side note: if anyone ever tells ypu they can run a 4.6 40-yard dash, or meet any other NFL performance standard, bet them they can’t. The statistics you hear about pro athletes are INSANE compared to what ordinary humans can do.

      Maybe a small person who’s run track all their life could produce a pretty good 40 time. But they’re not 6-foot-3, 250-pound balls of violence like NFL prospects are.

    2. I’m assuming he’s still running to find a bathroom, adding urgency to his dodecagenarian stride.

      Also that he’s going to unzip and go on the field.

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