Josh Fruhlinger’s April Fool’s Day post at Comics Curmudgeon included this remark:
This is just another example of (the main characters of Intelligent Life) responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval.
April Fool’s Comics – The Comics Curmudgeon
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase, “Pavlovian noise of general approval.” For our purposes, I take the word Pavlovian to mean “expressing a conditioned or predictable reaction.”
Which got me to wondering: is this blog just Pavlovian noises of general disapproval? Are we just throwing red meat at people who enjoy that particular flavor of red meat? Are we no better than the clucking, smirking, comic book-addicted clones of the Funkyverse, who stand around agreeing with each other that all Tom Batiuk’s personal tastes are really neat-o?
I think we are better. And I’ll tell you why.
If you pay $5 to go to a live show, a social contract emerges. You, the ticket-buyer, have an expectation that you will be entertained. You trust the venue to arrange a series of skilled performers that are worth $5 of your money, and two hours of your time. If they don’t deliver, you will be dissatisfied, and advise others not to visit.
The venue probably has expectations of you as well. They may have a dress code; rules about what substances you’re allowed to consume (or possibly required to consume, in the form of a two-drink minimum); and that you don’t disrupt the show to an unacceptable degree.
In comedy clubs, heckling is a part of the show, but there are well-understood standards about what’s too far. I’ve also known comedy clubs to forbid the use of certain words and subject matter. Because there’s a social contract between comedians and clubs as well: break our rules, and we’ll ruin your reputation.
Now think about newspaper comics. There’s a social contract here as well. If we turn to the comics page, then we, the readers, have the right to expect that the cartoonists have made a reasonable attempt to entertain us. We don’t pay that $5 cover charge, but we do invest a little time every day. But when we open the funny pages, what do we see? Roots country music. One man indulging his sexual fetishes. Incoherent sports drama. A parody of an 87-year-old movie. Millennial-bashing, raised to the level of gaslighting. NASCAR jokes that wouldn’t be good enough for a children’s joke book. Whatever Judge Parker is nowadays.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of that?
And I’m not even including strips like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Curtis, Doonesbury, Garfield, Hagar The Horrible, Herb and Jamaal, Hi and Lois, the aforementioned Intelligent Life, and the many Z-grade Far Side clones. I’m not even including other strips I’m usually critical of: Luann, Mary Worth, and Pluggers. All these strips at least try to honor the social contract of being worth 10 seconds of your time. Though the word “try” is doing a lot of work here.
Now to Funky Winkerbean. It has three clearly defined eras: Act I, when it was a solid satire of high school life; Act II, when it shifted to drama but was still worth following; and Act III, when it became a self-indulgent shitshow about book signings, comic book covers, and multi-month self-interviews.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of those things?
I suspect most of us followed this pattern: liked Funky Winkerbean in Act I, tolerated it in Act II, and were disgusted by it in Act III. The social contract broke down in stages. It went from something that was pretty good, to something that was at least worth 10 seconds a day, to something that angers us so much that we spend a lot more seconds a day hating it.
And now Crankshaft seems to be trying to make people hate it.
Son of Stuck Funky 