Banana Jr. 6000

Payola And Kennedy

Since the Winnipeg Blue Bombers ~~week~~ ~~month~~ ~~year~~ endless arc has begun, it’s a good time to talk about a Funkyverse concept I’ve been wanting to give a name to. This is another installment in my TBTropes series.

“Payola” was the practice of individuals accepting money to play certain songs on the radio. It was the early days of mass media, and radio DJs found they were well-positioned to accept bribes from record companies who wanted their work on the airwaves. A similar concept was “plugola,” which was a product endorsement done outside the traditional advertising arrangement. Congress started putting an end to these practices in 1959, at the same time they went after against rigged TV game shows.

This isn’t really what Tom Batiuk does in his comic strips, though. Poster The Drake of Life nailed his motivation:

I assume TB is a fan because someone related to the team paid him a tiny bit of attention and he glommed onto it desperately.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2025/07/18/we-were-all-thinking-it/#comment-176917

I believe this also. But neither “word “plugola” nor “payola” works to describe all the corporate logos, borrowed intellectual property, and childhood favorites that that drive plots in Funky Winkerbean and its spinoffs. Batiuk isn’t getting money under the table to do this. I’ve invented the following TBTropes term to describe it instead:

Egola: any plot element in the Funkyverse that exists to indulge Tom Batiuk’s ego.

I gave it the same -ola ending. It’s pronounced with emphasis on the E, rhyming with “Ricola” from those TV commercials.

Let’s list some examples of Egola in the Funkyverse:

Winnipeg Blue Bombers
Ohio Music Educators Association convention
Ohioana Book Fair
The Phantom Empire
The Flash
other comic book properties he likes, like John Howard’s Batman logo t-shirt and the Superman art during last week’s interview
San Diego Comic-Con
the negative renaming of companies Batiuk doesn’t like, like FleaBay and Toxic Taco
stories where the characters pretend to share Tom Batiuk’s own shallow opinions, like “climate damage” and school tax levies
Plots about Lisa’s Story, which is really just promotion for Batiuk’s own real-life books about it
Montoni’s, in its role as a stand-in for Luigi’s pizza of Akron, Ohio
The entire book publishing process, as depicted. Which, according to Tom Batiuk is: declare self “good writer”; write book off-panel; get agent; design cover; do book signings; do interviews; do more book signings; win awards; do more book signings; design more covers; win more awards; repeat.
The entire character of Batton Thomas
Especially his endless, insufferable interview with Skip Rawlings. (Holy cow, how big does your ego have to be to think that two dinner meetings isn’t enough time to interview you properly?)

Drake of Life went on to say:

Think he’ll bother to make up a story about why Jff’s a fan?

I don’t think he will. Even though it would be stunningly easy to justify Jeff’s interest in the CFL instead of the NFL: he’s from Cleveland. I’m sure the woebegotten Browns have driven plenty of people to get behind teams like the St. Louis Battlehawks rather than the local team. (And I root for an NFL team whose last big game was the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.)

Exploring Jeff’s thought process could be great fun. There’s a whole Internet culture of football fan bases poking fun at each other, like Drew Magary’s “Why Your Team Sucks” series, and YouTube creators like UrinatingTree and BenchwarmerBran. You could do that kind of story here.

Instead, Pam and Ed have been talking to Jeff like he’s Rain Man having a fit about missing Judge Wopner. “It’s still in the wash”? He was wearing it the last 15 times we’ve seen him! This is an excuse you’d give your two-year-old who’s upset about misplacing a stuffed animal. I wonder how bad this is going to get.

(Canonical side note: if it’s true that this is Jeff’s “game shirt”, that means anytime he’s wearing it, he’s trying to watch a Blue Bombers game. Go back and read that “Ed dials his own cell phone” Sunday strip again, and imagine Jeff is a football addict who’s being distracted from his precious game. Gives it some of that subtext it needed, doesn’t it?)

We Were All Thinking It.

Well, at least Batton got something out of it. 🙂

Use this space to react to the Batton Thomas interview, or talk about something less excruciatingly boring. Again, I’ll do this bullet point style:

Batton Thomas has now been talking for well over two hours, finally gets to the part where he gets the cartoonist job, and… skips over it. Absolutely stellar.
Is this how Tom Batiuk thinks interviews are supposed to work? That they just let you drone on for hours and hours and hours about whatever you want? Highlighting Skip’s lack of journalism skills is belaboring the obvious at this point. But sheesh, he could try interjecting a question.
It’s no wonder Tom Batiuk always gets ripped off in his syndicate contracts. Apparently he just signs whatever they mail him.
Finally: have you looked at any other comic strips this week? Batiuk is being out-Batiuked all over the place right now.

Luann is doing a rerun about selling comic books door to door. Rex Morgan, M.D., has spent the last six weeks on a story where an unknown adult man thinks country singer Truck Tyler is his father. SPOILER ALERT: he’s not. Mary Worth is spending a week packing to go to New York to hang out with a 14-year-old. Who knows what Gil Thorp and Mark Trail are even about anymore.

It feels like every drama comic strip is trying to duplicate Batiuk’s lazy, tedious, self-indulgent, exposition-heavy, character-shilling, skip-over-anything-interesting writing style.

Remix

I mixed the last two Crankshaft strips into a much better joke.

Points for discussion:

Yes, I know Les is short for “Leslie.” But if Tom Batiuk can throw out decades of character history to make a joke work, so can I. It just makes the parody more realistic.
Is Lisa evil? Is she actually worse than Les? Les’ Muse Abuse sets the bar pretty high. But Lisa’s victim complex, need to be the center of attention, micromanagement of Les from beyond the grave, and complete disinterest in her child make this race closer than you’d think.
Have you noticed nobody in Westview actually watches or reads Lisa’s Story? As outlandish as the parody strip seems, it is 100% consistent with what we’re supposed to believe, that the movie was of Oscar quality. Pam and her dad having a nice movie night watching Lisa die again is a lot more plausible than them watching old Looney Tunes.
Murder In The Burnings will be resuming soon. There’s still a long way to go in the story, but I’ve been visited by Le Chat Bleu lately.

Can’t Spell Batiuk Without A-I

Today’s Crankshaft is one of the most incoherent strips in recent memory. To give you a text description:

Ed can’t find his cell phone. He asked Pam to use her cell phone, so he can call his own phone to locate it. His friend Ralph is on the other end of the phone. Ed says “Ralph, what’s my phone doing at your house?” Ralph says “your phone isn’t here.” Ed says “I can hear it ringing.” Pam’s husband Jeff walks into the room wearing a Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt and carrying a ringing cell phone, and says “somebody looking for their phone?”

At first, I thought the joke was “it’s surprisingly difficult to dial your own phone number, because you’re so used to dialing other people’s phone numbers.” I remember this being true when I was in high school, when I had to do things like call my parents from a friend’s house. But the way cell phones work negates that. You save the number under the person’s name, and pick the name out of the contacts list when you want to call. I don’t even know my friends’ or family’s phone numbers anymore.

Also: Ed never actually dials from Pam’s phone. So Ralph being on the other end of the call only makes sense if Pam is already in a conversation with Ralph. But that doesn’t make sense because Ralph is Ed’s friend, not Pam’s. She also appears to be mid-dial when Ed interrupts her, so there isn’t an active conversation going on. By the same token, Ralph’s number wouldn’t be in Pam’s phone – it would be in Ed’s phone.

The punchline is that Ed’s phone rang in the other room. But why is Ed’s phone ringing if he called Ralph? Why is Ed’s phone ringing if he’s even talking to Ralph? Ed could have done the cumbersome “put one call on hold and dial another call” maneuver, but not enough time passed for that to be possible. It’s also contrary to Ed’s usual befuddlement with technology. But we also just saw him build a sophisticated AI gardening system, so who knows?

Speaking of AI, that’s exactly what this strip looks like. The joke starts with a relatable premise, but then forgets to include an important plot point (Ed dialing his own number), and the punchline contradicts the setup. This looks like a joke an AI would write.

So I decided to fight fire with fire. I asked Galaxy AI’s Joke Explainer tool to tell me what in the hell is going on here. I fed it the textual description above, plus a few clarifications like Pam being Ed’s adult daughter and Jeff being her husband. I called it “American humor” and asked for a simple explanation. Here’s what it said:

This joke is funny because it plays with the idea of confusion and unexpected twists.

Well, I can’t argue with that. “Unexpected and confusing” is Tom Batiuk’s later work in a nutshell.

Setup and Expectation: The joke starts with Ed losing his cell phone and asking his daughter Pam to help him locate it by calling his phone. This sets up a relatable scenario—everyone has misplaced their phone at some point. We expect that Ed will find his phone soon.

Okay, fine.

Miscommunication: When Ed calls his phone, he talks to his friend Ralph, who insists that Ed’s phone isn’t at his house. This creates a little tension because Ed can hear his phone ringing, leading us to wonder where it could be.

But Ed didn’t call his phone. We never saw him do that. And if he did, he wouldn’t be on the phone with Ralph. The AI fails to detect that this series of events makes no sense.

The Twist: Just when you think the situation is getting serious, Pam’s husband Jeff walks in wearing a Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt (a Canadian football team) and carrying a ringing cell phone. The humor here is in the surprise—Jeff is the one with the ringing phone, which is revealed to be Ed’s phone.

Classic example of “garbage in, garbage out.” The AI has ideas about how humor is supposed to work, and is trying to make this humor-like sequence of words fit that model the best it can. It can’t see Ralph’s involvement for the non sequitir it is. (Or more correctly, non ducit.) It’s an unnecessary detail that confuses the reader. Batiuk’s writing does this all the time.

It’s also not surprising that Jeff found Ed’s phone. The whole scenario implied that Ed misplaced it somewhere around the house, because that’s the only scenario where dialing it would be any help. The actual surprising part was Ralph being on the phone, but the AI had to assume that was an important part of the story.

Visual Humor: The image of Jeff walking in with the phone adds a visual element to the joke. His casual entrance contrasts with the confusion and urgency of Ed trying to find his phone.

Batiuk got “show don’t tell” right today. He visually delivered the punchline instead of having Jeff yell it from off-panel. One point for that, I guess.

Cultural Reference: The mention of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers adds a layer of cultural context. While it might not be essential to the punchline, it gives Jeff a character…

And there you have it. Jeff’s personality is Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

…and adds a bit of humor through the absurdity of the situation—why is he wearing that shirt while holding Ed’s phone?

The AI correctly identifies why we continue to be fascinated by the Funkyverse: it’s so absurd, it adds humor to itself.

This Week Is Going To Be Awesome! (That Was Sarcastic.)

This week’s story in Crankshaft actually offends me.

It offends me because I was a news journalist once upon a time. So I know firsthand what a huge amount of work goes into creating video content. Even a simple 90-second TV news story means you have to write scripts, schedule, shoot, edit, add on-screen graphics, mix sound, fix errors, and manage the whole project.

And YouTube content can be even more complex than that, with fancy animations and the like. Don’t let the lo-fi, “I shot this in my apartment” aesthetic of YouTube content fool you about how much effort it requires.

Computers make these tasks a lot easier now, but that just means you have more competition. Almost anyone can be a content producer nowadays. Which is a good thing! YouTube is full of great stuff, from people whose voices we never would have heard otherwise. It turns out, the world is full of Hal P. Warrens. And they’re making broadcast-quality stuff. (There should be a Warren Award for do-it-yourself filmmakers.)

But Tom Batiuk has decided that Lillian needs to be a media star for the 25th time now, so now she’s going to become The Reluctant YouTuber. As if this were even possible.

This week is a great example of something Epicus Doomus often says: Batiuk never runs out of new ways to be infuriating and boring at the same time. It’s recently become a sport for commenters at this blog to try and guess what the next week of Crankshaft will be about. Known future stories include the upcoming Pete-Mindy wedding; the trip to Winnipeg for a Blue Bombers game; a likely trip to San Diego Comic-Con in late July, even though post-Funky Winkerbean has pivoted away from Atomik Komix; the endless Skip-Batton Thomas interview; Cindy’s pregnancy at Age 75, which is entering its fifth trimester; and standard Crankshaft plots.

But no, Lillian needs to be rewarded for doing nothing again, when she’s one of the most vile characters fiction has ever created.

Never mind all the practical problems with the story. In today’s strip, it looks they’re shooting a TV commercial for Lillian’s Murder In The Blank series. This book has a limited appeal, and has already been out for months. A promo would serve little purpose. And they’re shooting it with a cell phone? The video quality is going to be crap.

It’s like they’re trying to do a BookTok thing. But BookTok is a community for readers to talk about what they read, not for writers to promote what they wrote. And Lillian’s work is probably self-published, which is another hurdle to clear. Book reviewers usually have a policy against reviewing self-published/vanity press works at all, because they insist that a book have survived the winnowing process of being selected by a publisher. I can’t imagine the BookTok community would be receptive to this old self-promoting crone.

Another thing that annoys me: the girls work for Lillian, not vice versa. Especially after the recent week where they demanded to be paid. I think she hired one, because the other one still works at Centerview Sentinel. (Well, at least we know how the paper is still getting made, while Skip sits in Montoni’s with Batton Thomas for months on end.) But as we all know, no Funkyverse character can refuse to do something some other character wants, even when they’re that character’s boss.

But what galls me the most is how dismissive the Funkyverse is of every profession that isn’t teaching high school, writing, comic books, or pizza.

Making web videos? Pfffft. Easy stuff that anyone can be famous at. Remember when Bingo the Cat wandered into a video, and St. Spires church raised enough money to pay the national debt? Remember when Frankie was handed a reality show to slander and humiliate his sexual assault victim who died of cancer? Remember when Hollywood just stood around and let Les Moore make all the decisions for “his” movie, paid him a bunch of money, and probably took a loss when it failed? Remember how Cindy Summers became a national TV news reporter despite being a lazy, vacuous idiot?

Remember when Funky humiliated that investment planner for no reason at all? Or the many times he was a jackass to a doctor and their staff? Or when he abused his position as support group coordinator to workshop his lame standup? Remember the “Toxic Taco”? Remember “FleaBay”? Remember became how Crazy Harry and Donna/The Eliminator became world champions of a notoriously difficult video game, despite rarely picking up a joystick otherwise?

And before this week is over, Tom Batiuk will make a YouTube star out of a 105-year-old woman who doesn’t even want to be one. Who also can’t even make her own website, or write her own biography. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who’s picked up a camera.

To answer Lillian’s question from Monday’s strip: yes, Lillian, you have lived far too long. But technology has nothing to do with it. Dieplzkthx.

(UPDATE: As of Saturday, Lillian had only two YouTube followers, but still manages to be smug and insufferable about it. The whole week was an exercise in phony humility. “Oh, poor little old me doesn’t know anything about YouTube.” Then starting on Thursday, she knows she needs a professional voiceover artist, and knows what a follower is.

Which speaks to the underlying problem of it all. All the books, all the videos, all the signings, all the awards, all the interviews that get created by the dozens of characters in the Funkyverse serve only one purpose: an ego wank for the creator. We never even see them creating the content, or even having any real desire to create it. Just like we didn’t see it this week. The plot is always: 1. Declare self a writer. 2. Receive praise.)