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.

Own Goal Post

I wanted to wait for last week of Crankshaft to complete before composing a post on it. I wanted to take in all six days of that awe inspiring arc. And I wanted a good long time to mull it over.

I was deliriously happy reading Crankshaft last week. It brought me such joy, but I’m having trouble putting my feelings into words. Because the happiness comes from a place so esoteric and weird I don’t know any good ways to describe its origin.

Let me try to dissect it. As best I can.

Batiuk’s strawman bellyaching about comics not being funny has been spouted before, but mostly always by a series of nameless men and women, sometimes not even pictured.

This time, he put all the complaints in the mouth of Crankshaft: the namesake character of the entire strip, and the most well liked character left in it. The only character that hasn’t been completely swallowed up by Batiuk’s ego and eroding theory of mind and spat back out as a pathetic manchild simpering over comic books (or one of the blonde brainless hivemind Banana Jr brought up in his last post).

Batiuk doesn’t come across as the winner here. Not to me. Because the protagonist of Crankshaft is Crankshaft.

It was oddly compelling, to have a character get a chance to bitch at their stupid creator, have the creator attempt to put them in their place and fail. What a self own! What an own goal! It’s practically Biblical.

You turn things upside down,
    as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
    “You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
    “You know nothing”?

Isaiah 29:16

In this case, I’d say the pot can tell the potter, “You know nothing.” Because Batiuk sure as heck doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. All he’s done is make Crankshaft the spokesperson for every snarky commenter that keeps his strip afloat.

Maybe he realizes this. Maybe this is some kind of 3D chess move of giving his warring camps of snarkers vs fans figureheads to rally behind, all to keep his strip relevant. Maybe that’s what Batiuk meant by Saturday’s strip. Hate readers are readers after all. He certainly hasn’t shut down his comments section, unlike other creators on GoComics.

Whatever Batiuk’s true motivation, the one who really lost out on all this is his pathetic avatar, Batton. No one liked him anyway, and an entire week of passive aggressive smirking leaves him about as tolerable as Spanish Flu.

And, as if to prove the supremacy of Ed Crankshaft, what do we get to start out this week? Two classic Crankshaft strips starring Crankshaft that were actually pretty funny.