Tag: sports

Someone, Please…Make It Stop

Link to today’s crime against comedy strip

Wow, talk about a gag that got stuck to the bottom of the wastebasket under the liner and was only discovered now. A fitting end for a truly terrible and extremely stupid arc. Why even have long-running gags if you’re not even going to try to make them funny? “Wide asleep” sounds like something a roundtable of seven year-olds might come up with during a giggle fit after a few swigs of Mountain Dew. Just mind-bogglingly terrible. I don’t know how cashing checks for “writing jokes” this awful is even possible (or legal). Just remember this abomination the next time you’re reading one of those puff-piece interviews in “Parade” or the Plains Dealer regarding that Pulitzer nomination.

Special thanks to TFH and the rest of the SoSF staff for their tips, support and of course the opportunity to guest host the WWW’s premier FW snark blog, bar none. And special thanks to you, the snark brigade, who never fail to find the humor in these daily turds. Sometimes trying to find anything remotely “funny” about this strip is like trying to start a fire in a monsoon with some soggy matches and wet paper towels. I don’t know how TFH has done it for all those years, after that band camp thing and this football crap I’m just about ready to reach for the vodka and Xanax. Anyone can riff on Les talking to his dead wife’s ghost, but it takes a special sort of snarker to tackle, say, “Funky names his car”, for example. Excuse me, as I must now go and hit myself in the head with a brick until I purge the last two weeks of this strip from (what’s left of) my brain.

Until next time….stay Funky!

ESP…(ZZZZZZZZ)

Link to today’s strip

It took me a second to decipher this one, then I rued losing the precious second of my ever-shortening life I just foolishly wasted on that truly idiotic joke. The Scapegoats are so woefully uneducated and stupid that they fail to realize their coach is a brainless buffoon, instead choosing to believe that perhaps the other team is using “extra-sensory” powers to discern the Goats “game plan”, as it were. As if Coach Bushka’s “game plan” involved anything more than frustrated eye-rolling and exasperated put-downs. And pizza…lots and lots of pizza. But you already knew that last part, amirite?

Sticking with that theme, perhaps the Goats are just not properly motivated Westviewian-style. Maybe during their next game he could have an (unpaid) assistant stand in the end zone with a Montoni’s pie and a stack of old comic books from the pre-WWII era. I’d bet you that would light a fire under Bull’s pathetic squad, right?

Culture Schlock

Link to today’s strip

Sigh. A completely played-out premise masquerading as a “beloved running gag”, featuring the usual half-assed and really bad “punchlines” that make less sense the more you ponder them. Otherwise known as “a Wednesday in August” in FW parlance. Hearing Bull whine about a “culture” of losing is like hearing Lisa complain about how sickeningly goody-goody everyone in town is, or Les bitching about someone else constantly speaking in bad puns. Part of me wants to believe that maybe the joke is at least partly that Bull is just too stupid to realize that he IS the “losing culture” at WHS but I know better. This strip doesn’t have any subtexts like that and whenever it appears that it might it’s pretty much guaranteed to be just an accident. Nope, the “gag” here is what the football gag always is: some variation on “we suck” and that’s it. Forty years in a row. Sigh.

Everyone here knows that I’m a big fan and admirer of Westview’s long tradition of making hand-lettered signs and banners and hanging them with haphazardly placed, non-symmetrical pieces of tape. I always wonder about that, as it’s one of the most consistent things about the artwork from year to year. Every time you see one of those hand-lettered signs, it’s always taped to the wall all crookedly and randomly. I think it’s because TB feels it lends an element of “down home” folksiness to it, but I like to believe it’s because all Westviewians suffer from some sort of strange tape dyslexia that prevents them from doing it right. Anyhow, nice job with that today, Batom Inc. Nice cinder block wall, too.

Fade to Wack

Charles
April 20, 2013 at 4:53 am
…So where did we go this week? Well, Les dithered around uselessly and then started writing his script in the most mundane fashion imaginable. I can’t believe Batiuk is actually going to do this. Never mind that he’s going to show Les writing this script, but what he’s going to have Les writing is godawful.

Not to mention improperly formatted.

Everybody can relate to the illness and loss of a close friend or loved one. And Batiuk did a creditable job of telling “Lisa’s story” the first time around. Readers were moved; at least the ones who didn’t object to such depressing content in the comics section. But TB, through his avatar Les, has spent the last five and a half years rehashing this story over and over again, as a book and then a movie, and Lisa’s story has become All About Les. The book was a success, and adoring fans lined up for their signed copies. Then Hollywood sends him a fat check and lets him write the screenplay, despite his complete lack of screenwriting experience. All the while, Les carries on like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. After a week of dragging his heels, today the Delicate Genius can bask in the afterglow of having written a trite and stilted line of dialogue.

Does the “home run” fantasy indicate that what he’s just written is the last scene? Doesn’t the story end with Lisa dying?

Screen Pass

davidorth
April 13, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Ooh, I got a leaked scene Les is working on! Let’s take a look!

Int: Les and Lisa’s apartment above the pizza place
(Lisa is checking her self in the mirror after the football tackle thing after she landed on her chest. Her handsome husband is in the other room, saying funny, witty things about stuff)…

Guess that leftover pizza did the trick! Les finally begins crafting a screenplay which so far happens to read very much like davidorth’s “leaked scene”.