beckoningchasm

Gagging Run

(“Running Gag” has already been used twice…had to come up with something for a title…[hangs head in shame])

Say, do you ever catch yourself thinking, “You know, those Sunday strips with Funky and Les jogging are great and all, but why are they so darn short? I’d like to see a week of those!” Well, brother, you’re about to get your wish! Have you ever considered therapy?

The joke in this is always the same: Funky’s a fat old doofus who hates exercising and is unequipped to survive it. Les is an up-and-at-’em type who always outperforms. There’s only so many variants on “Funky is a fat lazy loser” and, let me tell you, none of them are funny. This one is just stupid, and poorly presented. It should show Les and Funky speaking on the phone, the night before; then Funky’s dumb non-something would at least make a certain amount of character sense (any excuse to avoid getting up early). Saying his line now, after they’ve been out for a while, makes Funky look genuinely stupid. Talk about low-hanging fruit….

Here’s an idea, Funky. If you hate exercise so much, if it’s nothing but a burden, why not stop? You’ve been doing it for years and it is clearly not benefiting you in any way, other than making you even more miserable (if such a thing is possible) and thus able to commiserate with everyone around you. Your *cough* best friend Les seems to use this time to remind you of how superior to you he is in every way. Let’s face it–you’re never going to lose weight, you’re never going to feel good about yourself, and what you see right now in life is all you will ever have. Your creator clearly despises you. Everything else in the universe is punishing you; you don’t need to join in too. You might die sooner, but you might die happier, too.

Admittedly that’s a stretch, but in this strip, any death seems like a happy occasion. Finally, someone is free of the dark clutches of this strip. Free to rot and molder, and–I think I’ll stop typing now.

Wrappin’ Around

Link to today’s strip.

Well, now that we’ve enjoyed a week of nothing at all, it looks like we’re seeing some actual hazing! But no, just turns out to be a glimpse of something that happened to that Ol’ Punching Bag Himself, Wally Winkerbean, many years ago.

Odd, isn’t it, that Becky’s example has to be something that happened twenty or thirty-odd years ago, and she’s only just this year put a stop to it. I mean, we couldn’t have used someone slightly more contemporary, like Owen, to make Becky look a little less uncaring and incompetent. But one suspects that when Owen graduated, his model sheets were thrown into the fire so that Tom Batiuk wouldn’t be tempted to take the focus away from Dinkle and Les.

The last panel does, on the face of it, constitute a “punchline” and it would ordinarily be a pretty good one. But given the slant of this strip, my first thought was “This store is going to go out of business.” Odd again that the store seems to sell nothing but plastic wrap (and lottery tickets) again indicating that this prank has been going on so long local merchants are dependent on it for economic survival–but only now is Becky addressing it. The town will probably dry up and become abandoned, and the band camp will be relocated to Camp Crystal Lake (at least Jason would be easy to draw). An interesting view of Chesterton’s Fence. I guess I’m defending hazing! Funky Winkerbean has made me a terrible person now.

I guess also that this tosses a glitch into the Batiukian Theory that men are the only ones who can act; that the sole function of a woman is to supply cookies and milk to a comic-book reading session. Turns out women can utterly destroy things. Here’s to equality!

Stay On Target

Link to today’s strip.

Look, Mr. Batiuk, you were talking about hazing, not bullying. They are two entirely different things. Hazing is something that a person submits to because they want to belong to a group. Bullying is something imposed on a person, because the bully feels hostile toward that person.

You can’t switch gears in the middle of, oh Hell, why did I type that? Of course he can, and he does, all the time. Nothing ever gets resolved; it just gets dropped. This strip is the epitome of uncaring laziness.

Apparently, Tom Batiuk thinks that mentioning something is the same thing as discussing it, and that’s all that needs to be done for a problem to be solved. The problem, as I’ve repeatedly said, is that mentioning means nothing. You can mention anything. All you’re doing is throwing out a name.

Watch this: world hunger.

There. I have just solved the problem of world hunger. You’re welcome.

If nothing else, this week has been a good long peek into the creative process for this strip. Fitting that it ends with “bullying,” which as we learned yesterday, we’ve replaced with “bullsh!tting.” See? They’ve got some of the same letters, which makes this hilarious!

We’ve Replaced Humor with Humidor

Link to today’s strip.

(Wikipedia: A humidor is any kind of box or room with constant humidity that is used to store cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Just so you folks don’t have to look it up.)

This is definitely a “What?” strip. As in, “What kind of thought process arrives at this end?”

Is this in reference to yesterday’s strip, about freshmen in the lake? Now they use bottles for water, instead of a lake? If that’s the case, I can’t even. I mean, the lake thing was just last night, and now everything’s awesome?

Has The Odious Dinkle’s blathering on about himself actually solved the problem of band camp hazing?

Or is this another example of hazing–these girls are forced to drink bottles of water, because hazing? If that’s the case, why isn’t Becky stopping it, if she’s so goldurn concerned?

Sigh. I know the answer. Tom Batiuk saw the word “hydrating” and noticed that both it and “hazing” begin with an “h” and have a couple of vowels in common. But this isn’t a pun, or even amusing in any way. It’s not even a malapropism.

If Crankshaft thought of this, even he would not say it.

To Have and Have Not

Link to today’s strip.

Credit where it’s due: a nice touch in today’s strip is the kid with the trombone. He was in yesterday’s strip as well, walking roughly in the same place, so it’s a very good way to show that time has not passed between yesterday’s strip and today’s. In other words, despite taking a week in real-time, only a few minutes have gone by in strip-time. It would be better if he had the same color shirt as yesterday, but I’ll be generous and put that down to an error by the syndicate.

However, I find The Odious Dinkle’s dialogue in panel one to be pretty damned off-putting. What exactly does he mean? Becky mentioned problems with hazing, and that was only a few minutes ago–so, no, she hasn’t had the time to do anything, so, yeah, the problems with hazing probably are still ongoing.

What I find off-putting about this is the idea that The Odious Dinkle has been treating everything Becky says as an opportunity to blather on about himself, and now that he’s blathered on for a while, he’s surprised that his blather hasn’t solved every problem Becky has. Why, I’ve just told you I have problems, how dare you claim to have them as well. It’s this kind of total self-absorption, this hermetically sealed worldview, that makes The Odious Dinkle so odious. It makes one long for a replay of the Becky on the scissors-lift scene, only substituting The Odious Dinkle for Roberta, and including the payoff.

What I really don’t get is The Odious Dinkle’s reaction. “Old uniforms?” What does that mean? I have this horrible feeling that these are uniforms from his tenure as band leader, and as such should be treated as sacred relics. Which quite frankly makes good my point about his raging egoism, and thus makes me loathe him all the more.

Let’s hope someone hides his oxygen bottle.