Grab Bag Week: High School Hijinks Edition continues, and yes, dear reader, today’s strip is the source of that oh-so-punchable Les face in this week’s banner. That’s the expression Les wears when he’s doing what he does best: being a smug, superior dick to his students. Owen’s right, Les, for once: that was a trick question. Doesn’t the fact that nobody, nobody in his class is able to answer this question say more about the teacher than the students?
Tag: Westview High School
WHSTV
You’d think that producing Westview High’s closed-circuit morning newscast would be a job that a couple of geeks like Cody and Owen could not only do but might actually do pretty well. Naturally, everything goes terribly awry, as typified by the fact that the picture on the TV is upside down. Just more fuel for Les and Linda’s disdain of their idiot students.
Never mind that, though. Get a load of who’s sitting in the front row: it’s Alex, most recently seen dispensing totally worthless relationship advice to lovestruck Owen. Surely there is some retconning going on here: we met Alex at mopey Pete’s book signing in December 2007 (see below), and she appeared to be at least high school age five years ago (I was going point to the fact that she sported tattoos even back then, but apparently Ohio law allows minors to get tattoos with parental consent). She’s certainly old enough for Pete to attempt hitting on, though we know that that’s not the best indicator. Note that her model sheet on the Meet the Cast page is one of the few that does not give an age. How convenient.
Dec. 10, 2007 strip:
Basket Boink
A couple questions: we know that Bull coaches the girls’ basketball team, and is Westview’s athletic director. But what class is he teaching here? Have we ever seen him in front of a classroom? Maybe he’s been pressed into service to cover for one of the teachers who’ve been let go? And why is he holding a putter?
Chair Up, Jim
Guess the whole Lord of the Late arc really is over and done. Not that I was looking forward to week 3…anyway…looks like Linda’s dire prediction has come true: Westview’s voters have rejected the school levy and some teachers have been let go. Sadly, thanks to tenure, Jim Kablichnick not only gets to keep the job he despises, but is allowed to help himself to the spoils of others’ misfortune.
Here’s another strip that would have worked without Batiuk tacking on a punchline: the humor derives from the fact that even in the midst of a crisis, sour, selfish Mr. Kablich-prick thinks only of himself. But we get Jim not only offering a sassy retort, but mangling the famous “when the going gets tough” quotation. Maybe he means to say “When things get tough, the tough get…things”?
A Lowell in the Action
Today’s strip takes us through space, from London to Lowell, Massachusetts, and through time, to the mid-nineteenth century, to finally arrive at a weak “pun-chline” which a year or two ago would have been served up by Cory “Call Me Fishmeal” instead of Cody.
As an aside: a long-running comic to which FW is often (unfavorably) compared explains how “small lapses in continuity and art…only add to the charm” of “artisanal comics” such as Funky Winkerbean…check out today’s Doonesbury!
[Edit: Link to today’s FW and to Doonesbury were incorrect; I’ve fixed ’em now]
Son of Stuck Funky 
