Tag: Crankshaft

What A Drag It Is Getting Old

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.

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.

It’s The Thought That Counts

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, because he’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?

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?)

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.