Montoni's – Page 32 – Son of Stuck Funky

iForgot

SoSofDavidO here, hoping from the looks of today’s strip that the Alzheimer’s storyline is kept to Crankshaft and not bleeding over into Westview as Crazy Harry seems to have forgotten his phone. But hey, at least they made it back before things got too crazy with Holly and Darin alone in that sweltering pizza shop.

hooded

Meanwhile, Keith Repairguy doesn’t have enough space above his character for a word balloon so we’re left wondering what the hell he’s still doing there. Is Funky supposed to drive him home? Is he waiting for a tip?

Box of Pain

SosfDavidO here, and Oh boy… it looks like Monday’s Band Box strip wasn’t a one-off, we’re going to be here all week! In today’s strip we’re introduced to the band box repairman, a smirking, middle-aged, overweight bald guy. Great. That won’t be confusing at all to readers, considering that’s half the cast of FW.

Nick of Time

SoSfDavidO Here, and don’t even try and figure out today’s title, as it’s not punny at all, unlike In today’s strip. It’s the title to a Twilight Zone episode that freaked me out as a kid and I think is fairly appropriate of a comparison to Montoni’s. In it, a young William Shatner is held hostage by the idea he can never leave a little diner because of a tiny mechanical fortune teller that seems to have hold over him.

And here is Darin, almost seemingly stuck in a small diner he can’t escape from either! The mechanical band just seals the deal as far as reminding me of the Twilight Zone episode.

Can anyone ever truly leave Westview?

Meet the new creep, same as the old creep

In today’s strip, Craaaaaaaaaaazy Harry says, “The one-armed trombone player looks a little creepy.”

Becky drawn without a mouth Creepy John says to Owen: Young people who play video games are nothing but status offenders. What about a one-armed, mouthless band leader, Harry? What about that? Is that creepy enough for you? What about your “employer”? Are you serious?

Send band boxes, guns, and money

Today, DSH John suddenly appears, which is always unsettling. We can be grateful, however, that he has nothing to say, although he does smirk in the final panel.

BanTom favors us once again with unnatural dialog that exists only to introduce a pun. When Stephan Pastis does this in Pearls Before Swine, however, he builds elaborate chains of verbiage—so you know what’s coming, and the fun is in trying to anticipate the pun line.

The structure of today’s joke is much different. (To paraphrase the magnificent Alice from The Vicar of Dibley, and as a reminder, a joke is a story with a humorous climax.) Panel 1: Funky delivers the straight line, which contains the curious phrase “the band box is R.I.P.” Do people use R.I.P. as a synonym for dead in Ohio? If so, I haven’t heard it during my visits there. Anyway, he delivers the straight line: “Either the band box is R.I.P., or I bite the bullet and get it repaired.”

In Panel 2, in a case of premature jocularity, Crazy Harry delivers the punch line: “Biting the bullet would make you a very high-caliber person.”

And aye, here’s the rub: there’s still one more panel to fill. There has to be a second punch line, which I’ll not deign to reproduce here. And that utterly ruins the structure of the joke. Also, there’s smirking.