Circus of Pain

5/18/06

Just a short thought today, ladies and gentlemen:

I've never been a huge fan of Family Circus, oh, who am I kidding, even as a kid I thought it sucked out loud, and the punch lines to über-pussy Bill Keane's "comic strip" are generally more cutesy than actually funny, sort of like something your senile, incontinent grandmother might say while high on morphine, but I have to admit to being awestruck by one strip I read accidentally while looking through the paper yesterday. Unfortunately I couldn't find a picture of it on the web, so you'll just have to use your imagination here:

In classic Keane form, it's just your basic one-panel with Jeffey pointing at a rock about the size of his head. He's looking back over his shoulder, (presumably at his father) as he says, "Hey, Daddy, I could pick up this rock if it wasn't so heavy!"

I'm sorry, did I just have a stroke or is that not a punch line? Not only is that not funny, it's not even a joke! I guess old Bill is playing off the fact that kids say some really stupid shit sometimes that makes you wonder if your children are retarded and maybe you shouldn't have been doing keg-stands in the third trimester, but "if it wasn't so heavy!"?! Clearly Bill has simply run out of ideas and began sketching out the first thing to come into his mind after repeatedly bashing his head into the lid of the toilet. I mean, yeah, I've heard kids say some kind of accidentally funny stuff, but then again I've also seen kids smear their own shit all over the living room wall and I doubt I'd draw a comic strip of either one.

Here's a few others that leave me scratching my head and rather painfully wishing I had a low enough IQ to find this powdered fecal matter funny, because I bet the world is a real magical place to those kind of folk.





If someone can explain to me why any of this is funny I'd love to hear it, because I wager you might have a heart attack trying to first convince yourself in the first place. These captions can only be considered punchlines in the same way that napalm can be considered pesticide. I won't even start on the crap-fest device of having "Billy" draws the cartoons from time to time. The only tiny saving grace of the strip is that the mom is pretty stacked.

Fuck you, Bill Keane.


Other strips that may have had a place in their day but have gone on so long as to become horseshit parodies of themselves:

1. Garfield - We get it; he's a fat-ass cat with a depressed owner and inexplicably hates Mondays. Take a rest, Davis!

2. Marmaduke - Do I even have to talk about this one?

3. Cathy - 80% of the women I work with are Cathy. Ack!

Little side note here, if you want to see an example of maybe the worst, bargain-basement versions of "observation humor," I mean stuff so bad it would make Andy Rooney roll his eyes (providing his eyebrows hadn't annexed the space) I invite you here. The page is called "Questions for a Greater Mind Than Mine," but a more accurate title would be "Questions so mind-numbingly idiotic you would kick the person actually saying them in the nuts." Here's an example:

"Why did Tarzan refer to his simian companion as "Cheetah," and not something like "Chimpie?" Couldn't he tell the difference between a big cat and a small ape?"

Seriously, this is painfully bad.

Listen, I realize comic strips are an easy mark; making fun of the above is the satirical equivalent of beating up an asthmatic gerbil, but sometimes you just got to get it out, y'know?



Also on my mind:


Anytime you hear somebody accuse an entire group (blacks, whites, liberals, gays, etc) of having an "agenda," you can be positive you're listening to an idiot.