Cindy’s Popularity Was Just a Cover for Insecurity? Whoddathunk?!
Cindy was the most popular, so she gets to talk about getting left out TWICE. Or we’re supposed to interpret the start of this interminable pity party on Tuesday as a private conversation between Funky and Cindy, and thus she warrants a second confession to the entire group. Continue reading
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The Minority Characters Speak Out!
Roland was an anti-establishment activist. Of course he didn’t feel a part of things in high school. I suppose we can read this as Roland feeling alienated even before, and choosing an identity in the counter-culture that justified those feelings.
At least by talking about prior ‘protests’ and ‘anger’ Rolanda has made her line specific to her, so she’s leaps and bounds ahead of Crazy and Funky this week. But Batiuk is just writing her saying this because he wants to let his new trans character talk one more time before this arc ends and she disappears forever.
It’s Derek who’s giving me a chuckle today. He gets one word. One word this whole year. “Seriously?”
I’m guessing that this was intended by the author to reference the one or two strips where he felt ‘alienated’ by his race. He was one of a few black students in a mostly white school. So obviously (sarcasm) asking him if he felt left out is silly.
But I am invoking Death of the Author.
Because Derek is the embodiment of ‘Seriously?’ As in, “Why do I exist in this asinine universe surrounded by stupid, unfunny, jokes?”
Every time he would stare out at the audience, it was like a cry for help through the crack in the Fourth Wall. He had this air of resigned desperation. I imagine you would get a similar expression if Charles Dance was sent to a hell populated entirely by Teletubbies.
And so when Derek today says, “Seriously?” I don’t hear, “Yes, of course I felt like an outsider.”
I hear, “Seriously? Seriously? It’s been 50 years! I hardly even remember high school. Why did I even come to this? Why did I bother to bring the ultrasound picture of my great-grandson? Or the photos of my granddaughter getting her doctorate? Why did I bother looking any of these chucklefucks up on Facebook to see what they’ve been up to. I came all prepared to talk about Les’ movie getting an Oscar. Cindy’s work on BuddyBlog. What it was like being stuck in LA for the fires. Funky’s punk son finally making an honest woman of that poor pretty army chick. Holly’s biography on being a majorette. Rolanda’s work counselling the families of senior gender transitioners. Maybe share some memories of Bull and Mary Sue, since this is our first reunion without them. But naw, I shoulda known better. These assholes are just gonna stand in a row all facing the same way, like they’re posing for a picture no one is gonna take, and pass the same damn sentence down the line in the world’s most half-assed game of telephone. Fuck these cookie-cutter punch-outs all thinking they’re a special snowflake. If they’re not all dead by the next reunion, I’m not coming. I was hoping to talk to Barry Balderman and Carrie and Melissa, maybe catch up with Wanda, but naw. They were too smart for this shit. I mean. Seriously?”
“At least Les didn’t have a pity party over his dead wife again.”
Speaking of Les! Here’s some more writing advice from the past! Brought to you by the world’s least prolific biographer.
We Are The Son of Stuck Funky Admiration Affiliate
Preserving the old strips from being abused
Protesting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
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Crazy Harry? Copying the crowd? Strange but true.
Crazy Harry was never part of the ‘In-Crowd’? GASP! I don’t believe it. (sarcasm)
Crazy Harry noticed or cared enough to feel excluded? I don’t believe it. (not-sarcasm)
He could barely tell that Mr. Mathews openly despised him.
Crazy was so weird that he bent reality around himself. And he didn’t seem to notice how strange it was.
And yet, he was voted Student Council President in an election against Mr. Mean, Median, and Mode himself. So his weirdness notwithstanding, he must have been liked well enough.
50 years later, Crazy Harry is barely wacky enough to wear a Hawaiian shirt to his reunion. And his line today could have been spouted by anyone in attendance. In fact, it already HAD BEEN. TWICE. In order to get his anemic little point across, Tom will let Harry rag on high school now as if it wasn’t a decent time for him, that he reminisced on fondly just earlier THIS YEAR.
Banana Jr put in wonderfully in the comments yesterday.
It’s not exactly The Breakfast Club, is it? Those were different characters who each, in their own way, learned that they had some things in common. This is like watching Twelve Angry Men, if they all agreed he’s guilty in the first minute and spend two hours telling each other how right they all are.
I’ve complained about it before. I will complain about it again. But the hollow sameness of every character cripples this strip in ways I don’t think Batiuk realizes. You ever buy a danish, or a jelly doughnut, and when you bite into it you realize that all the filling has been baked out? That’s an Act III Funky Winkerbean character. Bland, flakey, overcooked yet doughy. And completely empty inside.
When poking around the Toledo Blade Microfiche, looking for when Cindy first hit it off with Funky, I stumbled across a hilarious and yet infuriating week.
Les teaches Sadie Summers STORY WRITING.
Ah, Tom’s a writer and Tom is bold
Tom is bolder than the writers of old
But whenever he gets in a bit of a jam
There’s nothing he won’t do to let Harry rag
Harry rag, Harry rag
Do anything just to let Harry rag
And he curses himself for the life he’s led
And writes himself a Harry rag and puts himself to bed
Ah, Tom’s old Lisa is a dying lass
Soon they all reckon she’ll be pushing up the grass
And her bones might ache and her skin might sag
But still she’s got the strength to let Harry rag.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Quick! The most popular and objectively successful member of the class has admitted they never felt like they fit in! Everyone must fall in line behind her and parrot her sentiments! This will prove how alienated and apart from things they all were!
This would almost be a joke. If the idea that “Les was a dork in school” hadn’t been hammered home so many times the nail is halfway to China, and they’re using a percussive drilling machine with 2000 feet of rod to reach the punchline.
What even does ‘In-Crowd’ mean? In my experience, you want your circle of friends to share your interests and enjoy the same things. A chess club nerd is going to be lost and bored at a football kegger. The kids I knew in high school that were miserable were either the ones that faked their way into a clique that didn’t really suit them, or the poor kids who never found a niche no matter how small.
But Funky was considered perfectly acceptable in High School. Neither the most popular, nor the least.
‘Average’ is the first bit of characterization Funky was given, and as far as I can see it held true through 20 years of high school. You’ve got to give him some credit for keeping Les as his best friend, since nothing probably dragged him down Cindy’s popularity rankings more than having human tumor Les Moore clinging to his side.
I would say that Funky should let Les speak on what it really felt like to be excluded in high school. Since if anyone has a right to speak on the topic it is him.
But I bet Funky and crew remember Les’ self-righteous downer of a commencement speech and rightfully figured the less he said on the topic the better.
Wanda has been smart enough to NEVER attend a reunion following the 2008 fiasco. But really she should have known what she was in for, since Cindy showed up at her door in 2004 to for an entire week of groveling. Something I only found after my Wanda retrospective back in March.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Cindy deathly ill?! Click here for the shocking evidence!
Now we KNOW Batiuk is stalking this blog. He saw our intense discussion a couple weeks ago about the best guitar solos, and needed to weigh in.
And yes, Tom, “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has an absolutely screaming guitar solo. Good call.
Name dropping quality limey rock music won’t save this strip from being carefully dissected for all the logical and continuity failings within.
Let’s go panel by panel.
Panel one, Cindy thanks Funky for letting The Reunion Committee borrow the jukebox. This implies that Cindy is back on The Reunion Committee. For the 2015 Time Pool arc, Cindy ceded up Chairman of the Committee to Les because she was moving to LA to work for BuddyBlog.
So after settling in in LA Cindy decides to join the committee again despite the long distance? Plausible I guess. Most planning for these things is done online anymore. So Cindy was on the committee for this reunion. A reunion held in the high school (gym, cafeteria, commons?) with a pizzeria jukebox as the DJ? NOT PLAUSIBLE.
Moving on. Would they seriously transport a 250 pound classic jukebox to the high school for a bit of kitchy flair to go with their careful decorating scheme of random balloons, crepe paper, and pink frilly table cloths? When a cell phone hooked to a speaker would give you better sound and a better selection?
Logically dubious.
The jukebox has a the B-side to The Kinks 1966 best selling “Sunday Afternoon”? Plausible.
Cindy chooses the song. Plausible. Because it’s a killer jam. Yeah, it would have come out when they were in Middle School. But so what. “Sweet Child of Mine” charted when I was a fetus, and I listen to that all the time.
Plus, she just came to her 50 year reunion looking 40 years younger than her cohorts with a handsome movie star on her arm. She’s been a national news anchor, won an EMMY, and lived in New York and LA. She is literally not like anyone else there. Plausible.
Funky finds her song selection interesting. No. Not unless Funky has it in his brain that Cindy doesn’t have an appreciation for proto-punk rock. Even Cindy choosing the song as a flex isn’t implausible and Funky should know this.
Cindy confesses that, “She never felt like a part of things in High School.”
…
…
Cindy practically RAN the social circles of the high school. She was at the very apex, dictating who was in and who was out and what all the cool kids would be doing. She ranked every single person and made sure she was at the top.
Maybe she did feel disconnected from everyone else. Those who seek to dominate others rather than befriend them often do. But I don’t feel sorry for her for a second. Because unlike all the poor kids she put outside so they’d have to look in at HER, her alienation was entirely self-inflicted.
When I was in middle school, I looked up to who my mom had been in her school days. She’d been a cheerleader, and a homecoming queen, and gave the class valedictorian speech. I, on the other hand, was a chunky, geeky, midget with a propensity for uncontrollable bouts of weirdness. My mom sat me down and told me a story.
She said that when she was younger, she looked up to her older sister, who was also super popular and glamorous. She asked her sister how she got so popular. My aunt said, “Be nice to people, be nice to everyone you can. If you do that, nothing else matters, you will be popular.”
Maybe it’s because I was in a medium small school. Maybe my class was just friendly in general. But I followed my mom’s advice, and in my own weirdo, class clown way, I was popular. Maybe I didn’t get invited to the parties of other cliques, or have football players beating down my door for dates, but people weren’t unhappy to see me sitting next to them in class. I was fondly thought of by the majority of my classmates and even occasionally admired for my self-confidence to be unbearably weird.
All because I realized early on that I didn’t have to be a part of everything to be a part of things. That people didn’t really care how good I was at stuff, how pretty, how tall, as long as I was a friendly face that treated them like they had value. There were a few jerks this didn’t work on. But they were few and far between.
In honor of this week, I pulled out my senior class book. There I was, voted one of the four “Most Creative’.
What I said I’d miss the most? “Nurse’s office.”
Unbearably weird.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Link to Today’s Unbearable Punning.
After a week of Holly being cripplingly insecure, she now is trying to infect others with her self-doubt.
Cindy is a good call to try and make self-conscious. Her entire tenure as character, Cindy has been consistently portrayed as brimming with self-confidence ONLY when arbitrary ‘success’ conditions she’s built up in her mind have been met. She’s like a popularity Pharisee, as long as she’s safely within the Talmud of Flawlessness, she’s a self-righteous zealot.
But you take her ONE INCH from the straight and narrow, and she collapses. And this was worse when she was younger. When not having a date for New Year’s Eve had her hiding out at McArnolds with LES MOORE, because it broke some unwritten mental rule of hers.
And she has a history of jealousy when it comes to her romantic partners.
But yes. Cindy’s jealousy. Maybe not completely misplaced when it came to Funky and Rachel.
But, of course, she’s also been jealous of Masonee Jarree.
But it is LAUGHABLE that Cindy would be jealous of the Westview Women Lumps on display today. Marianne and Rachel were both women YOUNGER than her and lauded as attractive. Cindy is still miles above anyone else female at the reunion. Even with the crippling scoliosis she’s been stricken with in panel 1.
This, this is the ultimate power FANTASY. Parading your delicious arm candy to all the dowdy hausfraus in Ohio. Beneficently allowing all the ugly old geese a moment to pose with your prize.
I mean, who could be jealous of ‘scribbles’ and ‘Jan’? Who even is Jan?
Is she some late Act I graduate I’m unfamiliar with? Why not Cindy’s old wingwoman, Carrie?
Or Les’ senior prom date, Melissa.
Because the only Act I Jan I can think of is Ladies Club, Rap Cellar, Jan. As in Jan and Marcia.
So that is my headcanon now. These two ladies posing with Masone are Marcia and Jan. They crashed the reunion in order to meet a movie star. They’re a good 8-10 years older than everyone else, but everyone is so dumpy looking no-one can tell.
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Hottie Budd got a nose job? Click here for the stunning evidence!
I stared at today’s strip for hours. Trying to decide if I was amused, offended, or bored.
On the one hand, valued commenter The Dreamer foresaw this strip yesterday.
I’m waiting for Cindy to show up. At the 50 year reunion, standing with all her old geezer classmates, still looking 25 years old with her great body and younger movie star boyfriend Mason Jarr…..
And I’m getting sick of Holly Budd Winkerbean being so mopey and self-conscious. A single strip of it is relatable, a week of it is exhausting.
On the other hand, it’s at least a structured joke. Again, the nature of my own parents’ relationship skews how I’m seeing things. They tease each other mercilessly. My mom once joked that my dad was going to leave her for his old college girlfriend, and my dad just scoffed.
“It would take too long to train someone else.”
And they laughed, sitting in their cluttered dining room wearing sweatpants and baggy t-shirts, sipping coffee from out-of-season Christmas mugs that never got put away. They were both in on the joke, that learning to put up with someone new, a whole new set of pet peeves, failings, wants, and triggers would be too exhausting. And beneath the ribbing is always the stubborn kind of unconditional love that has them picking ditch side tiger lilies and cooking enough pot roast to last a week because they know that’s just the thing to make the other smile.
But when I peeled the lens of my own experience away, I was lost. My sense of objectivity completely wrecked. I was seeing, but I had completely lost the ability to understand.
So I asked some of my normie friends. All women between 29 and 40. Some single, some in relationships. None with kids. People who know of Funky Winkerbean, and this blog, because of me ranting at them. But not people who could tell a Jessica from a Mindy at 100 paces. I sent them today’s strip and just said.
PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS STRIP. Positive, negative, neutral, confused, whatever I just want some normie outsider perspective on it.
So, there you have it. Some normie opinions on today. As close as we can get to that hypothetical newspaper reader who occasionally catches a strip or two while flipping through the paper. The only thing skewing the sample is that all of my friends are just as into hyper-analyzing media as we are here. You give us something to dissect and we start gleefully pinning it down and pulling the wings off.
But what do THE EXPERTS think?
I’m eager to find out.
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Marianne does NOT look like someone who is willing to give away her Oscar in the first today’s strip. No, she’s looking at that Oscar the way most characters in this strip look at comic books.
The rest of this is as rote and pat as an Oscar acceptance speech can be, so let’s have some fun with another crowd shot of “famous” faces. Help me fill in the blanks and fix the mistakes where my corrective lenses deceived me.
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OK, three weeks until the actual Oscars ceremony, plenty of time to build suspense. Will Marianne beat out Gretchen Gold and Cordelia Rama for best actress? We won’t know for sure until…
The first panel of today’s strip?!
Uh, points for brevity, I guess, though in this case it is most certainly not the soul of wit… or any other word positively associated with writing. In the absence of anticipation as to whether or not Marianne will win the little golden man statuette, we have the ridiculousness of professional actress Marianne (and no stranger to public speaking and media attention) not having any remarks prepared despite having an apparent one-in-three chance of winning. This is compounded by the ridiculousness of her asking advice on accepting an award from a guy whose work outside of Lisa’s Story and Starbuck Jones consisted of Dino Deer, My Dog Pookie, and being incredibly nervous about simply doing a table read (!!!) for the unfinished masterpiece that was Lust For Lisa.
At least Cindy’s shtick is consistent.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Today’s strip begs the classic 5 Ws (and an H) of writing. It also begins the Oscars story Variety promised last month. Yeah, I thought that maybe if I buried the lede it would stay in the ground, but alas.
Who is Mason talking to on the left? Wait, he calls her Marianne… that’s supposed to be Marianne Winters? The lady with the pentagon head and the pigtail-bun hairstyle my niece insisted on wearing when she was a toddler is Marianne Winters?
What is with TB’s willingness to use Hulu and HBO’s trademarked names but still insist on sticking to the eyeroll-inducing “Netbusters”?
When does TB think the Academy Awards ceremony takes place? We’re three weeks out from this year’s Oscars broadcast… Does that mean? Oh no, please no. I really hope TB just got the dates wrong.
Where is the “chateau” where this “real party” is happening? Chateau Marmont? Haha, really? I guess if you don’t know… then you don’t know. I’m in no hurry to find out, either.
Why are Cliff Anger and Vera Nash here? Neither one was involved in the Lisa’s Story movie at all… well, other than inexplicably being at the film’s wrap party.
How is this story going to end? Insufferably, no doubt. I don’t think any other outcome is possible.
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Son of Stuck Funky 
