Category: Son of Stuck Funky

How Many Things Can We Find Wrong With This Story?

After Pizza Box Monster week ended with this atrocity, let’s keep this discussion simple.

Let’s see how many things we can find wrong with this story. I’ll use this post to compile them into a list. GoComics and other such providers allow you to view comic strips for the past week without any login or account. So until Monday, anyone can view the entire week. Here are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Let’s begin. The only rules are:

  • Be brief. Have you ever read the nmop-əpisdn answers in Hocus Focus? They’re very short, like “beard is missing” or “arms have moved.” Explain as much as you need to, but be terse. Keep it to a sentence if you can.
  • Stick to the actual content of this week’s strips. No meta-errors, or comments about Tom Batiuk’s production process.
  • Things that are wrong in the long-term context of the comic strip, such as Pete and Mindy’s marital status and their business relationship with PBM, are permitted.

Here we go!

  1. Monday’s strip shows PBM leaving after helping decorate the restaurant. The pizza box costume would make any physical movement very difficult. (BJ6K)
  2. The PBM costume has no visible eyeholes. (Y. Knott)
  3. On Monday, PBM says he’ll “come back for lunch when things aren’t busy.” At almost any restaurant, lunch is expected to be busy. (BJ6K)
    • Gleeb points out that this could mean “the time we restaurant workers take lunch”, not “when lunch is served.”
  4. On Tuesday, Pete calls PBM “one of their silent partners” in Montoni’s. No other partner has ever been seen or mentioned. (BJ6K)
  5. Somehow, Pete and Mindy have somehow entered into a business relationship with an unknown person. (BJ6K)
  6. Pete tells Mindy to “stop obsessing” over who the PBM is. Given that business relationship, she is right to want to know who this person is. (BJ6K)
  7. On Tuesday, Pete and Mindy’s hands are visible. Neither is wearing a wedding or engagement ring. (BJ6K)
  8. The spider on the video camera screen on Saturday doesn’t match the one we see in the restaurant on Tuesday. (Green Luthor)
  9. The angle isn’t the same either. (Green Luthor)
  10. Owners of a security camera would not block it with objects. Or if they did accidentally, they would notice and correct it before an incident happens. (Green Luthor)
  11. The pizza that the PBM is served seems to shrink significantly in diameter between Thursday and Saturday. Compare how much counter space the pizza occupied on Thursday, compared to its much smaller depiction on Saturday. (Y. Knott)
  12. Despite wanting to see the PBM, the characters seem to be going out of their way to avoid seeing him. (several)
  13. How does Mindy know PBM was eating alone at the bar … unless she *saw* PBM eating alone at the bar? (Y. Knott)
  14. By dining in the restaurant and removing his headgear, it is possible that the PBM is trying to reveal his identity. Pete, Mindy, and Ed fail to consider this. (BJ6K)
  15. Even if Mindy didn’t see the revealed face *clearly*, it still seems counter-productive to leave the room with the PBM in it, only to essentially announce that “Hey, it sure would be neat to see the PBM’s face while the PBM is eating in the other room where I just was, watching the PBM eating. (Y. Knott)
  16. The story assumes that Mindy and Pete would know who the PBM is. If we’re going to ignore the whole ‘business partners’ problem, then there’s no reason to assume the PBM is someone would be recognized by them. (Green Luthor)
  17. PBM could mistakenly believe that they know who he is. (pj202718nbca)
  18. There was never any obstacle to simply looking at the PBM. Even if there was, Pete and Mindy own the restaurant now, and can easily invent a reason to be wandering the dining area during business hours. Beyond even that, it’s Halloween, and they could hide their own identities in a costume if desired.(BJ6K)

Have at it in the comments. Let me know if you made a suggestion and I didn’t include it (or an equivalent one).

Beating A Joke To Death

One of the drawbacks of my long-running TBTropes series is that the tropes have begun to repeat themselves. This was part of the design, though. I wanted to create a way to describe Tom Batiuk’s bizarre writing choices, so we can identify each when it appears. But this has made it harder to write new blog posts, because I’ve already explored the Batiukian technique de la semaine.

Like I said in the comments, I didn’t write about Buck Rub Week (October 13) or Crankshaft Lawyers Up Against Glitter Week (October 20), because I did almost two years ago. Almost everything in If You Make Sure You’re Connected, The Writing’s On The Wall applies perfectly to these two weeks of Funky Crankershaft.

I called this a Comedy Disconnect: “trying to be funny rather than communicate ideas, (sacrificing) reality in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs.” Which Batiuk does constantly. Despite routinely describing his life’s work in terms like “45 years in, ‘Funky Winkerbean’ creator isn’t going for funny.” He’s going for funny, but he certainly isn’t hitting it.

And we’ve got another reuse of an old technique this week: reusing a joke when it no longer makes any sense.

In Fight The Power, I wrote about how Batiuk continues to rely on Dinkle jokes long after the world changed in ways that rendered them problematic. Maybe high schoolers and high schools in the 1970s and 1980s had to silently tolerate Dinkle’s behavior. But senior citizens and churches in the 2020s do not. The environment changed, and the times changed. Act I Dinkle worked as a comically exaggerated depiction of megalomaniacal high school band directors. Now he just looks like a pushy, abusive lawsuit magnet.

Imagine a shot-for-shot remake of a classic teen/young adult comedy like Dazed And Confused or Fast Times At Ridgemont High or Revenge Of The Nerds set in the current decade. But it doesn’t update any of the outrageous details of life circa 1976-1983, or introduce anything that’s changed since then. This trope already has a name: Harsher In Hindsight. But since Batiuk loves to do this to his own work, I’ll give it its own name:

Not Funny Anymore: When a once-functional joke no longer works because the context around it has changed.

Harry Dinkle is Not Funny Anymore. Ed Crankshaft is Not Funny Anymore. And the Pizza Box Monster is Not Funny Anymore.

This is Halloween week. In Act III, PBM showing up at Halloween and terrorizing Montoni’s was one of the few fun things that happened in Funky Winkerbean. But the new reality is that PBM is now Pete and Mindy’s business partner. This reframes the underlying dynamic of “PBM is scary, because nobody knows who he really is.”

On Tuesday, Pete tells Mindy “you need to stop obsessing over who the Pizza Box Monster is.” No, Pete, you need to start obsessing over it. Because you’ve apparently entered into a business relationship with this person, and talked your fiancée into joining! Putting your trust, your financial future, and by extension your marriage, into the hands of an unknown person who wears a wacky costume, is skull-collapsingly stupid.

Never mind that this situation isn’t even possible anymore. Know Your Customer laws require any financial institution to thoroughly identify all parties early in the proceedings. And any party in the partnership would have the right to view any contracts they’ve signed. Mystery solved.

But it gets worse. Does Pete simply not care who the Pizza Box Monster is? Or does he know who it is, but isn’t telling Mindy? Because that’s a great way to destroy your spouse’s trust in you.

In a downstream joke that’s also Not Funny Anymore, Pete tells Mindy she’s beginning to sound like her grandfather Ed Crankshaft. The only reasonable response to that is an immediate trip to a neurologist. A young woman should not be talking like a 106-year-old dementia patient. Especially if Batiuk is going to act like Pete and Mindy are a generation younger than they actually are. Even more so when it overlaps with Dumbass Has A Point. Mindy is right to want to know this person’s identity, even if she doesn’t know why.

The scariest thing Pizza Box Monster could do this week is send Pete and Mindy a picture of himself in Russia with their life savings. Or even worse: their merged comic book collection. I guess they’d have to actually get married first, though.

Twilights Last Gleanings

After ten hours on the tractor today. And eight hours yesterday. And running calves the day before that…I have no brain meat to smash into a coherent Funkyverse adjacent post.

However, it seems I’m still awake, watching to see if my new favorite Mexican Dinger Bean, Alejandro Kirk, can waddle his way to another victory over the Evil Empire (the Dodgers BOO) in game 2 of The World Series.

So in order provide a new comments column for you beautiful people, and since some have enjoyed them in past: a collection of farm photos from this month.

Post Season Affective Disorder

I swear a Chien post is coming. Harvest has sapped half my energy and the other half was thrown away pitch by pitch watching the Cubs flail their way into the post-season only to trip and fall in a heartbreaking game 5 in the NLDS.

Now all I have to cheer for is anyone beating up on the Dodgers. Bummer.

In my drained malaise, I thought about Batiuk and his silly obsession with the ‘melancholy beauty’ of fall leaves. Last year I posted the first Existential Leaves arc of 1975. While I scrape together the energy to clean out grain bins and tackle Les Moore on Trial (With the School Board), I thought I’d treat you guys to 1976’s week of Fatalistic Philosophical Foliage.

Such an outdated Quercuscentric outlook. The Pinaceae were here before that, bigot!

“Climate damage means we won’t have any snowmen!”

“When a staminate and a pistillate are stirred up by great wind…”

Serious question. How is one leaf older and wiser than the other leaf?

Why is the younger leaf a buckaroo? Why didn’t he see the branches snap? How do leaves see? This is like Toy Story logic all over again!!!!

So the leaf prefers the prospect of death to continued interaction with an out-group? There’s a political joke somewhere in there I’m too lazy to construct.

He’s a regular Bud Belichick.