Tag: Becky

Babble Of The Bland

Link to today’s strip

“Recruiting violations”…uh, yeah. Whatever you say there, Lefty. I like how the audience is exchanging knowing smirks, like it’s somehow funny that WHS’ main rival is a bunch of dirty cheaters. Maybe tomorrow he’ll do a hysterical riff on Big Walnut’s history of hazing, doping allegations, sexual misconduct and kickbacks too, just to bring this idiotic sports analogy full-circle.

As I mentioned (complained about) last week, these stupid band gags still rely on the pretense of Dinkle’s overall nuttiness from back when he was the insane “win at all costs” tyrant who’d make students practice in monsoons and band majorettes immolate themselves for halftime entertainment. Without that pretense this is just a boring one-armed woman making smug wisecracks, which except for the arm thing neatly describes almost every other FW strip.

Preggers Banquet

Link to today’s strip

Ugh, more marching band hi-jinx courtesy of the one person on the planet who finds marching bands to be hilariously funny. That BatNom, always pandering to “real life” band directors who enjoy clipping individual marching band-based FW strips and taping them to their filing cabinets…sure, it’s a tiny demographic but an important one nonetheless.

I guess he’s comparing the high-stakes world of high school marching bands to the high-stakes world of college sports here. As I jabbered about last week, these stupid band jokes are only (hypothetically) funny within the context of the old Dinkle character, the over-the-top madman whose entire life revolved around marching band competitions. To do a gag like this you’d first need to establish that the WHS marching band is a cut-throat, deadly serious operation, which is exactly the opposite of how it’s usually depicted. Otherwise it’s this, a listless stupid out-of-context joke delivered by a character whose one defining trait is her missing arm. BanTom always wants it both ways, but the band can’t be this huge intense competitive operation AND full of lazy slackers who never practice. Yet it is.

Adventures In Chocolateering

Click here to find the fruit

Well, he’s resuming one of FW’s twenty thousand dangling plot threads, so that’s something. Unfortunately, though, it’s this one. Dinkle and his perpetually-ignored wife are traveling to Belgium to cash in big-time on Dinkle’s outrageous WHS band candy scam, but unfortunately for both Harry is a complete imbecile whose devotion to marching bands has left him totally unable to perform simple everyday tasks like a regular person. And because this is FW and he’s dealing with a government agency (at the airport no less), incompetence, annoyances and non-stop hassles are in store for everyone…including FW readers…assuming there are any, of course.

Dead Feeb

SosfdavidO here, and we’re back with “What hearing loss?” Harry Dinkle in today’s strip. Tombat really wrote himself into a corner with this charcter– it’s hard to kill off someone based on a real life person you know. So Dinkle is a spry 70 year old forever while the rest of the Funky Bunch slowly catches up to him, eventually likely even passing him in age.

“Dead Feeb” is as good of a password as I could muster from the variety of options available from musical notes but I’m sure someone can do better!