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.

Omphaloskepsis 

BOY I CAN’T WAIT FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK OF THE SAME 12 BATTON THOMAS HEADS PASTED OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN YES SIR.

We are reaching levels of pointless navel gazing approaching the mythical.

And I don’t even sit here wondering, “Who is this for?”

Because it’s for Tom. No one else.

As he nears his twilight hours, he looks back on his life and sees that his artistic ambition has only produced one massive work of significance: The Funkyverse, and he must achieve immortality within it.

Tom, like a dying replicant on a rainy roof, is overcome with the compulsion to speak aloud to his captive audience all the profound experiences recorded in his decaying brain.

“I’ve seen things you snarkers wouldn’t believe. Rainy leaves mouldering inside a dampened portfolio. Book signings inside voluminous convention halls. A rock with a weird notch in it. All those moments will be lost in time, like newsprint in mulch. Time to die.”

(Bloggers Note: Sorry I’ve been an absentee blogmeister for the last couple weeks. Dad’s been expecting more outta me lately as far as farm work goes, and so my mental batteries were pretty depleted. Thanks so much to Banana Jr. for being a champ teammate on this and picking up some of the slack. Love you all, and hope to be back in the snarking saddle again!)

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.