What A Drag It Is Getting Old

We’re back on a Crankshaft staple: old people moaning about how difficult their life is.

But do you ever think Crankshaft comes off a little …. humble-braggy? “Oh, look how old I am, I have it soooooooo rough.” And his eternal look of smug condescension doesn’t help.

Come on Ed, you should know that’s not how a “happy ending” works.
Did you never visit the Valentine Theater during the brief time it was a strip club?

Back pain, muscle soreness, medication, Ben-Gay, and deep tissue massages are a 56-year-old man’s problem – not a 106-year-old man’s problem. Crankshaft and all his buddies should all be on their arthritic knees, thanking God for how healthy and active they all still are. They can live independently in their own homes, work, travel, and have full range of motion. And not a drop of dementia or cancer in any of them! (Ed probably has dementia, but it’s considered “quirky.” SEE ALSO: Weston, Wilbur.)

Ed reminds me of Dinkle in this regard. He’s always whining about how hard he has it, but we never see him experience any actual difficulty. Have you noticed that Dinkle’s much-maligned bands have never delivered a bad live performance? Same thing with Crankshaft. Those pain lines will disappear the second Batiuk wants to do another wacky gardening mishap. Or if he wants to give Ed a third sports award this year.

He also reminds me of kids I knew in middle and high school who were always saying “oh, I failed that test!” Despite talking up their status in the valedictorian race the rest of the time. Oh, shut up, Julie. We all know you didn’t fail. You got an A, or maybe a B if you did really bad. One of the great things about moving past high school was that I no longer had to indulge people like this.

In a world defined by pointless, inescapable tragedy, I often wonder if Crankshaft causes any lingering bitterness in others. Ralph Meckler, Les Moore, and Eugene are all characters I suspect wouldn’t appreciate Ed’s constant keening about his amazingly superior health. “Timmy/Lisa/Lucy died decades ago, and I’m supposed to listen to health complaints from this guy who’s harder to kill than The Terminator?”

This has gone on long enough. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Ed Crankshaft needs to die. Cut the cord, Tom. You want to stop writing gags? Prove it, by getting rid of the character you most need to write gags for. And please spare us the ten years of vegetative state you think Ed still has in front of him. You’re getting into Gasoline Alley territory.

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Author: Banana Jr. 6000

Yuck. The fritos are antiquated.

34 thoughts on “What A Drag It Is Getting Old”

  1. Given what we had to endure today, killing him off would result in another boon to mankind: the long overdue disappearance of an overdone ‘gag’ that has all the appeal of finding a dead walrus on the dining room table: the muddled aphorism. Mangled English is funny if you’re Bugs Bunny. Mangled English in real life means you don’t know what’s wrong with the old guy saying Butterbald and every answers scares you.

    1. “muddled” would be an improvement. Today’s gag was so mild the other characters ignored it. “Yeah, we’ve dealt with your dad before. Also, there’s almost no difference between ‘ball’ and ‘bald’ when spoken aloud. It’s so non-confusing, I don’t understand why the writer is acting like this even is a joke.”

      1. Which leads to another thing that would disappear: Pam as intermittently incompetent and/or unnecessary interpreter. She can’t ask what amazingly obvious thing he’s doing if what that thing is happens to be decomposing.

  2. Also, we wouldn’t lack for story lines as the post-Crankshaft era would have a unifying theme: cleaning up the mess Ed Crankshaft made of the world.

  3. RE: 11/20’s C’Shaft:

    First — Ed grew up in the…let’s charitably say the first half of the 20th century, when “Butterball” was a common derogatory term for an overweight person. The Butterball frozen turkey debuted in 1954. Ed learned to read sometime in…let’s charitably say the final decades of the 20th century. There is no logical reason he wouldn’t know it’s “Butterball,” not “Butterbald,” as seen on the packaging and on TV commercials.

    Second — what sort of fancypants foodery do the Crankshaft/Murdochs shop at that you ask a butcher behind the counter for a Butterball turkey? Every supermarket I go to you grab one out of a freezer unit. I’m surprised the counterperson isn’t wearing a straw hat and sleeve garters.

    Third, and most telling of all — A Batiuk strip concerning Thanksgiving turkeys that doesn’t involve “Harry L. Dinkle, The World’s Greatest Band Director”? Blasphemy, I tells ya! Blasphemy!!!

    1. Maybe that’s next week’s arc. Dinkle will knock on Crankshaft’s door to sell him a “choir turkey.”

    2. One might request Butterball (or other preferred brand) turkey from the deli counter if they were buying it as sliced luncheon meat. I suppose you could by a whole cooked and refrigerated deli counter turkey if you wanted to as well, though I cannot imagine why anyone would want to do that. It certainly isn’t turkey the way one would typically serve it for thanksgiving (an inference I take from this strip given when it is printed).

      My big issue with today’s ‘Shaft is the idea that any store that has dealt with him before would be willing to let him through their doors again.

      1. Which is the central flaw of the Funkyverse. Most of the characters we’re supposed to love are detestable pricks no one would tolerate.

  4. Dying means nothing in the Batiukiverse, so Ed could be “killed off” then appear in Crankshaft even more than he did before. Or it could all just be a huge hoax, like with Phil Holt. IMO, that should be the final Crankshaft strip, a single-panel Sunday strip with just Ed’s face, all blue, with his mouth hanging open. You know, some prime Pulitzer bait.

  5. I’m gonna be a bit of a contrarian, and say that this strip is prime Crankshaft. It does exactly what Crankshaft does best — deliver smirking fourth-tier attempted wordplay that vaguely relates to a slightly befuddled, irritable and addled old man.

    A few things to note:

    – Just because this is what Crankshaft does best does not mean it’s done at all well. It’s just better than anything else Batiuk attempts. Remember: fewer dumb wordplay strips means more Skip interviews Batton, more Dinkle terrorizes seniors, more comic book crap, more Montoni’s crap, more book signings. etc. Dumb wordplay strips may be the apex of what Batiuk’s capable of achieving. If so … we may as well have more of ’em.

    – The slightly befuddled, irritable and addled old man being referred to? It ain’t Crankshaft.

    1. I agree that the low-tier punning is the best part of Crankshaft, to the extent anything about it can be called good. But “Butterbald Turkey” is atrocious. It’s only off by one letter, wouldn’t sound any different when spoken aloud,, and is something you’d just take out of the freezer instead of asking the butcher for.

      1. A good malapropism in a strip should imbue the thing with double meaning, or be used as some non sequitur punchline. Like those Pearls Before Swine strips with the horrible puns.

        There’s no joke here. And everyone is just grinning blandly like they’ve just eaten a fist of quaaludes.

        Here’s a fix.

  7. 11/21: Since Lilian Lizard is also a centenarian whose death would be a release, betting against her forgetting is a rare lucid moment.

  8. Having gone through the entirety of the strip in a fairly short time, I feel like Batty’s big problem is that he was unable to ever shake the instincts and style he honed spending 20 years writing a gag strip. Having passive characters who deal with crappy circumstances with resignation, having characters who are just kind of mean or incompetent worked in the context of a comedy. But that doesn’t work in a drama if the intent is that you’re supposed to like the characters.

    Batty changed the style of strip he was doing but wasn’t able to change the core of how he wrote which compounded with any other problems he had and his needing accolades and validation as he got older.

    1. And nothing, to me, encapsulates that moore than the reframing of Les’ less-redeeming qualities. Les is pretty much the same selfish, self-important shmuck throughout the entire strip, but TB chooses to reframe that behavior from solid gag-fodder to a sort of increasingly noble suffering beginning in late Act I and continuing through the end of the strip.

      2. Exactly. Les was, for the most part, just a hapless pud, and he was played strictly for laughs. Sometimes he had it coming, sometimes not. But the reader was never supposed to sympathize with him, or pity him. Then however, BatYam decided Les needed a girlfriend, and that girlfriend would require a whole convoluted back story, and the rest is history.

    2. The example of how to do it properly that comes readiest to me is Lou Grant. Put him in the WJM newsroom and he’s reacting to Ted being a pompous jackass. Put him in San Francisco and he’s a cool old guy.

  9. Is today’s joke here really “buy the canned cranberry sauce we know Lillian doesn’t need, so we can act like we contributed something to Thanksgiving dinner when we didn’t?” Because that would be very in-character for the Funkyverse.

    That’s the kind of shitty friends these people are. They meet their social obligations to you in the cheapest, laziest way possible, then turn around and make outrageous requests of you. Like, organizing resistance to a reality show because someone doesn’t like how they think someone might be depicted in it.

  10. Can anyone confirm this?

    The joke is that, way back when Lucy was alive, there was a running gag that they would invite the sisters over, Lucy had the responsibility of bringing cranberry sauce, but she would always forget, bringing endless mirth at her forgetfulness… until her forgetfulness was retconned into having been signs of onset Alzheimer’s, turning the entire thing tragic… then, after the strip killed her off, they wanted to STILL be doing this running gag, so now LILLIAN is the one who’s always forgetting to bring cranberry sauce.

    Is that what’s going on in today’s strip? Is it another obscure callback Batiuk thinks we all remember instinctively?

    2. Considering Act III has obscure Act I callbacks left and right, almost certainly. Who’s going to remember the girl who appeared in like two strips during a 1975 week long story when Les went to Washington D.C.? Almost nobody, but Batiuk likes randomly pulling deep cuts so he can go “See? My strips have history and reward long time readers!”

  11. Today’s Crankfuckery

    Ed: Pam, We’re gonna steal Donna’s helmet and travel back in time to get turkeys off the thanksgiving menu.

    Pam: Why, dad?

    Ed: Blame it all on Dinkle.

  15. 11/22: You can’t have Pam be THE DUMB GORL if the person she’s talking to is, like Batiuk, too stupid to understand what she’s actually asking. This zooms over the boob’s head.

      1. That’s what she should have said. Also, it speaks to why Batiuk fails as a writer: he can’t for the life of him understand how someone else would react to an event. Asking him how he’d feel and telling him that’s how the young girl feels makes no sense to him and is thus bullying.

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