Category: Son of Stuck Funky

Someone, Please…Make It Stop

Link to today’s crime against comedy strip

Wow, talk about a gag that got stuck to the bottom of the wastebasket under the liner and was only discovered now. A fitting end for a truly terrible and extremely stupid arc. Why even have long-running gags if you’re not even going to try to make them funny? “Wide asleep” sounds like something a roundtable of seven year-olds might come up with during a giggle fit after a few swigs of Mountain Dew. Just mind-bogglingly terrible. I don’t know how cashing checks for “writing jokes” this awful is even possible (or legal). Just remember this abomination the next time you’re reading one of those puff-piece interviews in “Parade” or the Plains Dealer regarding that Pulitzer nomination.

Special thanks to TFH and the rest of the SoSF staff for their tips, support and of course the opportunity to guest host the WWW’s premier FW snark blog, bar none. And special thanks to you, the snark brigade, who never fail to find the humor in these daily turds. Sometimes trying to find anything remotely “funny” about this strip is like trying to start a fire in a monsoon with some soggy matches and wet paper towels. I don’t know how TFH has done it for all those years, after that band camp thing and this football crap I’m just about ready to reach for the vodka and Xanax. Anyone can riff on Les talking to his dead wife’s ghost, but it takes a special sort of snarker to tackle, say, “Funky names his car”, for example. Excuse me, as I must now go and hit myself in the head with a brick until I purge the last two weeks of this strip from (what’s left of) my brain.

Until next time….stay Funky!

ESP…(ZZZZZZZZ)

Link to today’s strip

It took me a second to decipher this one, then I rued losing the precious second of my ever-shortening life I just foolishly wasted on that truly idiotic joke. The Scapegoats are so woefully uneducated and stupid that they fail to realize their coach is a brainless buffoon, instead choosing to believe that perhaps the other team is using “extra-sensory” powers to discern the Goats “game plan”, as it were. As if Coach Bushka’s “game plan” involved anything more than frustrated eye-rolling and exasperated put-downs. And pizza…lots and lots of pizza. But you already knew that last part, amirite?

Sticking with that theme, perhaps the Goats are just not properly motivated Westviewian-style. Maybe during their next game he could have an (unpaid) assistant stand in the end zone with a Montoni’s pie and a stack of old comic books from the pre-WWII era. I’d bet you that would light a fire under Bull’s pathetic squad, right?

Déjà Phew All Over Again

Link to today’s strip

If there’s one thing about the fairer gender that I’ve learned from FW, it’s that you gals just cannot resist those quarterbacks. Am I right, Lisa? Anyhow, this is just yesterday’s dumb “punchline” recycled and tweaked a bit, a sterling example of that legendary Batiukian laziness at work once again. If I was him I’d just take the week off and use last year’s football strips over again. It isn’t as if anyone would notice.

I do like the shocked expressions on the cheerleader’s faces though, like they just can’t believe that their obese, skeevy gym coach would even dare to go there. I guess the point here is that it isn’t Bull’s ineptitude that’s killing the football program. No, it’s the treachery and cowardice of the students that’s the problem and it’s so out of hand that the cheerleaders need to be reminded to refrain from throwing themselves at the team’s opponents. It all makes sense now…it’s those damned kids, with the chullos and the tweets and those f*cking plastic bottles.

Culture Schlock

Link to today’s strip

Sigh. A completely played-out premise masquerading as a “beloved running gag”, featuring the usual half-assed and really bad “punchlines” that make less sense the more you ponder them. Otherwise known as “a Wednesday in August” in FW parlance. Hearing Bull whine about a “culture” of losing is like hearing Lisa complain about how sickeningly goody-goody everyone in town is, or Les bitching about someone else constantly speaking in bad puns. Part of me wants to believe that maybe the joke is at least partly that Bull is just too stupid to realize that he IS the “losing culture” at WHS but I know better. This strip doesn’t have any subtexts like that and whenever it appears that it might it’s pretty much guaranteed to be just an accident. Nope, the “gag” here is what the football gag always is: some variation on “we suck” and that’s it. Forty years in a row. Sigh.

Everyone here knows that I’m a big fan and admirer of Westview’s long tradition of making hand-lettered signs and banners and hanging them with haphazardly placed, non-symmetrical pieces of tape. I always wonder about that, as it’s one of the most consistent things about the artwork from year to year. Every time you see one of those hand-lettered signs, it’s always taped to the wall all crookedly and randomly. I think it’s because TB feels it lends an element of “down home” folksiness to it, but I like to believe it’s because all Westviewians suffer from some sort of strange tape dyslexia that prevents them from doing it right. Anyhow, nice job with that today, Batom Inc. Nice cinder block wall, too.

Homedumbing Lame

Link to today’s strip

Sound logic there, Funky, you could land a gig with several NFL franchises or TV networks with that kind of keen pigskin analysis. No, seriously, he’d probably be an upgrade in a few cities (all eyes peer eastward to East Rutherford or westward to Oakland). At least the question of how Bull keeps his job has been answered: turns out the school board is always composed entirely of morons. “Let’s stay the course and hope that the law of averages balances things out”, otherwise known as “the roulette strategy”.

Seriously though, way to sell the program there, Tubby. Sitting there on the bench, gorging on pizza while his young charges get the crap knocked out of them by other high school programs whose coaches actually pretend to give a damn, doing little other than complaining, being grossly overweight and nonchalantly mocking his team’s incompetence. I mean I realize that BatTom has been doling out the karmic revenge upon Bull for a long, long time but seriously, does he have to be so thoroughly unlikeable? (I meant Bull but it works the other way too I suppose).

Suggestion re: a possible winning, successful, revenue-generating future WHS sports program…competitive eating. That is all.