I miss the early days of the Internet. It was devoid of toxic social media, and full of goofy creative stuff. If you’re not familiar with the primitive brainrot the title refers to, you can see it here. (WARNING: It will burrow into your brain like those Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan worms. If you do recognize the title, it probably already has. Sorry about that.)
This week’s cardinal arc reminds me of Badger Badger Badger. There’s a cardinal, and… that’s it. It exists as part of a larger work that defies any narrative sense. It’s practically trying to be a meme.
I know I’ve joked about the cardinal being Lisa’s ghost, and that’s still the favorite on the odds board right now (-500). But now, dragging out Lisa’s corpse for the millionth time seems too straightforward for Tom Batiuk. He seems to be veering into the avant-garde. As evidenced by this week’s Ingmar Bergman coloring. (NOTE: I initially missed that this effect was borrowed from Schindler’s List. Thanks to Y. Knott in the comments.)
I say this because I was baffled by the December 13 strip that ended “Pizza Box Monster as Santa” week. He gets paid by Lillian, shakes her hand, and then this:
What on earth was Tom Batiuk aiming at here?
Yes, that’s the building where this week’s proceedings occurred, but what is the point of sticking it at the end of the story? The second panel, PBM saying “Pizza on earth!”, is the kind of thing Batiuk would normally use for a punchline. It’s almost like he drew this panel and forgot to use it, so he stuck it here.
Sometimes you can end a story just by pulling back and putting it into its larger context. Like in A Streetcar Named Desire (the stage version, not the movie) or Cameron Crowe’s Singles. But that’s not what’s happening here. This isn’t a scene of people wandering around, enjoying Christmas, or anything else that would lend weight to the story. Not that there was much of a story to begin with.
I think Tom Batiuk is trying to mimic visual effects, and heartwarming endings, he’s seen in movies and TV shows. But he has absolutely no idea how to execute them, or why. That’s what I think we’re getting at the end of this week: an ornately staged, but confusing, ending.
Back when I owned a Sega Genesis (and the Sega Genesis was still current), there was an obscure but riotous game called Mutant League Football.
It was an over-the-top, super-violent version of American football. It was even more extreme than the later NFL Blitz. It was also a pretty good football game. It was so good, it was easy to forget how silly it was.
MLF was arguably better than the Madden series, which was primitive at that time. MLF was certainly more fun to play. Except that you had to play head-to-head; the vs. computer mode wasn’t much fun. My college roommate, friends, and I played Mutant League Football against each other like people play Madden nowadays, and like we played NHLPA Hockey ’93 at the time. We took it seriously.
MLF had a feature where you could bribe the referee, and he would call a stupid penalty on your opponent. This only worked once per game, so the secret was saving this for when you needed it. There is nothing more infuriating than getting a critical defensive stop on a 3rd-and-3, and then getting a 5-yard penalty for flicking boogers. The term “rage quit” didn’t exist yet, but I caused one or two. I hope the 2017 remake kept that feature.
I tell this story because of today’s strip:
Trinity Rodman is an elite professional women’s soccer player who also plays on the U.S. National Team. And, yes, she’s the daughter of basketball’s Dennis Rodman.
What post-apocalyptic mutant soccer league does this man’s daughter play in that gave her a broken leg? Not a sprain, not a foot fracture, a full broken leg. Soccer is not a violent sport! Especially not at the level of competition that exists in Westview/Centerville, which is Class A high school at best. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but that would be a pretty severe injury.
When characters under-react to something that is blatantly strange or unusual, TVTropes calls it an Unusually Uninteresting Sight. There are ways to justify this reaction, but none of them exist here, or anywhere in the Funkyverse. If anything, the Funkyverse runs on Unusually Uninteresting Sight. Characters don’t react at all when they’re being blatantly abused, attacked, exploited, manipulated, shown bizarre things, and left to die from untreated cancer.
Or, as we’ll see in the second panel, insulted.
In the unedited strip, Pam says “I’m sorry to hear that! How is she?” to which the man responds as seen above. I can appreciate that some people struggle to pick up social cues, but how oblivious can you be? Pam clearly meant “how is your daughter’s recovery going?” even if she didn’t say those exact words.
Pam showed empathy (in what’s basically a phatic conversation anyway), and the man throws it back in her face with a pedantic, unfunny response. It would be much more effective – and, dare I say, fewer inches away from reality – if Pam recognized this insult, and responded accodringly. The man was so eager to make a joke that he deliberately ignored the obvious subtext.
I often talk about the Comedy Disconnect, which is when the writer sacrifices reality in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs. I’ve further noticed that Tom Batiuk loves to do this when it’s completely unnecessary.
We don’t know who this man is, or who Lizzy is. (Unless he’s some Act I bit player Batiuk expects us to remember.) His opening line could have been “my son broke his leg playing high school football”, which is a far more plausible scenario. The rest of the strip could have played out the same way. Which still isn’t a joke, but let’s solve one problem at a time here.
Pam recognizing and responding to this insult is a perfectly workable second panel. In fact, my edited version of strip has two jokes in it – which is two more than the unedited strip has.
And this is a common problem in Act III/Act IV. Last week’s “Crankshaft juggles choir practice and the bowling championship” arc had multiple Comedy Disconnects that didn’t need to exist at all.
November 11: Crankshaft says “my father taught me how to play the ukelele when I was little.” This would have been about 1925-1930, when the ukelele was barely known in the United States. This could have been any musical instrument. Keep in mind that Crankshaft could not read yet.
November 15: Dinkle is annoyed that Crankshaft put a bowling team logo on the back of his choir robe. This ignores the fact that we’ve seen Dinkle raising money for choir robes on multiple occasions. The punchline could have been Dinkle handing Crankshaft a bill for the replacement cost. Which also would have kept Dinkle in character.
I came up with my own name for this more specific version of Comedy Disconnect:
Toxic Filler: When filler text inadvertently undermines the story.
We’re back on a Crankshaft staple: old people moaning about how difficult their life is.
But do you ever think Crankshaft comes off a little …. humble-braggy? “Oh, look how old I am, I have it soooooooo rough.” And his eternal look of smug condescension doesn’t help.
Come on Ed, you should know that’s not how a “happy ending” works. Did you never visit the Valentine Theater during the brief time it was a strip club?
Back pain, muscle soreness, medication, Ben-Gay, and deep tissue massages are a 56-year-old man’s problem – not a 106-year-old man’s problem. Crankshaft and all his buddies should all be on their arthritic knees, thanking God for how healthy and active they all still are. They can live independently in their own homes, work, travel, and have full range of motion. And not a drop of dementia or cancer in any of them! (Ed probably has dementia, but it’s considered “quirky.” SEE ALSO: Weston, Wilbur.)
Ed reminds me of Dinkle in this regard. He’s always whining about how hard he has it, but we never see him experience any actual difficulty. Have you noticed that Dinkle’s much-maligned bands have never delivered a bad live performance? Same thing with Crankshaft. Those pain lines will disappear the second Batiuk wants to do another wacky gardening mishap. Or if he wants to give Ed a third sports award this year.
He also reminds me of kids I knew in middle and high school who were always saying “oh, I failed that test!” Despite talking up their status in the valedictorian race the rest of the time. Oh, shut up, Julie. We all know you didn’t fail. You got an A, or maybe a B if you did really bad. One of the great things about moving past high school was that I no longer had to indulge people like this.
In a world defined by pointless, inescapable tragedy, I often wonder if Crankshaft causes any lingering bitterness in others. Ralph Meckler, Les Moore, and Eugene are all characters I suspect wouldn’t appreciate Ed’s constant keening about his amazingly superior health. “Timmy/Lisa/Lucy died decades ago, and I’m supposed to listen to health complaints from this guy who’s harder to kill than The Terminator?”
This has gone on long enough. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Ed Crankshaft needs to die. Cut the cord, Tom. You want to stop writing gags? Prove it, by getting rid of the character you most need to write gags for. And please spare us the ten years of vegetative state you think Ed still has in front of him. You’re getting into Gasoline Alley territory.
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.
Have you ever gotten a self-serving holiday or birthday gift? Like, a starter package for a pyramid scheme, from a pushy friend who’s been trying to recruit you for months? Or an accessory for a device you don’t have, from someone who has it, and wants you to get interested in it? Or a donation in your name, to a cause they support but you don’t?
That’s exactly what this arc feels like.
First, let’s keep in mind how bonkers this story already is. The plot mechanism is “Pam damaged Jeff’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt,” which, again, is a plot borrowed from media for pre-schoolers. Replacing it might have cost $50 total, including international shipping. Instead, Pam took the grandiose step of buying two tickets to a Blue Bombers football game, without even asking anyone if they wanted to go a game.
A game in Winnipeg. Which is almost 1000 air miles away from Cleveland. Toronto is only 300 miles from Cleveland by car, would have been a much better tourism destination, and every CFL team plays a game there every season.
Pam’s “gift” of a $50 football ticket obligated its recipients to spend well over $1,000 each. The flight from Cleveland to Winnipeg starts at $650. Plus taxes, fees, hotel, meals, ground transportation, and border crossing costs. Updating passports, if you need to do this, is also expensive and time-consuming.
So who paid all these add-on expenses? And why?
Jeff paid the trip expenses, because he’s the only one with a real job. This would make basic sense. Crankshaft has a job, but I doubt it pays much. And it obligates Jeff to spend money he may not wish to or be able to.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because somehow he is independently wealthy. This would explain a lot. I’ve long wondered how Ed is able to buy gobs of stupid crap online, while the family shrugs off the massive property damage he causes. There are real-life stories of janitors and teachers who built impressive savings accounts over their long lives. Crankshaft doesn’t seem the frugal type, but time is on his side. A penny saved in 1940 (when he was already an adult) would be worth $3.17 in 2024 according to online inflation calculators.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, becausehe’s the grownup. This would be consistent with how parent-child relationships work in the Funkyverse. Children are treated as subservient wards even when they’re in their 70s. Witness the Funky Winkerbean storyline where Holly’s mother bullies her into doing a cheerleading show where she gets seriously injured, and has to be treated a time when the family is doing home renovations, and Montoni’s is failing. Nobody ever says a word about this.
Pam also paid for the trip expenses, as part of the gift. This would fit Batiuk’s overarching theme of a mother wife doing having to pay penance for destroying the child husband’s special fandom object. But how does Pam have this kind of spare money lying around?
Pam paid the trip expenses, to force Jeff and Ed to get along better. This theory would address a long-ignored problem in the Funkyverse: Jeff and Ed should hate each other. They’re not blood relatives; they’re in-laws.
Ed’s shenanigans – which includes water damage to Jeff’s precious comic books – have done infinitely more damage to Jeff than one ruined t-shirt. Jeff is long overdue to give Ed a The Reason You Suck Speech that would push the one from Family Guy into second place.
The joke is that Quagmire’s many criticisms of Brian are all 100% canonical.
Ed wouldn’t like Jeff either, because Ed is needy of attention, and he would see his child’s spouse as a competitor for it. Fortunately, the Funkyverse is very asexual, sparing us from a Wilbur and Dawn Weston situation.
But let’s lighten up. These two disparate, unfriendly men traveling together for a common purpose should be rife with comedic possibilities. Planes Trains and Automobiles, the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the original Toy Story, and family movies like Step-Brothers, mined gold from such a premise. But unfortunately, the Funkyverse is also very conflict-averse.
Instead, we’ve gotten one week on the mechanisms of appeasing a toddler, and a week on the banalities of air travel. At least Jeff’s puke-inducing Inner Child hasn’t shown up yet. But he still might.
The last possible explanation:
Pam wants to get both Jeff and Ed out of her life for a few days. As much as Jeff should be a tightly wound ball of hatred, Pam should be far, far worse. She’s forced to constantly indulge two idiot manchildren and their consumptive, destructive ways. Any woman would have left both of them decades ago.
This could be a fun twist. It’d be nice to see the story cut to Pam enjoying a day of peace and quiet in the house, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that would be justified for once. But Pam is a woman, and the Funkyverse is very disinterested in women.
But why else would she buy Ed a ticket, when he wasn’t the aggrieved party?
Son of Stuck Funky 