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In this free-for-all Friday Trent explains why some comic strips are bad and others are purposefully not funny.
Transcript:
They call them the funny pages, the comics, if you have a newspaper, well, who has a newspaper anymore, but surely you remember these. At least they still have a second life online as comic strips. I used to remember these as a kid, picking up the newspapers and flipping through. I always liked Ziggy, Wizard of Id. Those are the good old days, right?
Today on Free For All Friday, I want to talk about three unfunny comic strips. So these are comic strips that are not funny. Some of them maybe by design or it’s a premise that is very thin and well-worn that doesn’t work. So that’s what I want to talk about today. Think about your favorite comic strips, and it’s quite possible. Maybe one of them will be one of the three that I want to talk about today. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. These is Free For All Friday. Monday, Wednesdays, as we talk apologetics and theology. But on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today we’re going to talk about three unfunny comic strips. If you like these comic strips, by the way, don’t tar and feather me. Don’t burn me at the stake. Humor is somewhat of a subjective thing. You might enjoy these comics. I don’t particularly enjoy them, and I found a lot of other people online who are not fans of them as well.
So here’s the first one I want to get into, and that would be Marmaduke. Marmaduke is a newspaper comic strip revolving around the Winslow family and their Great Dane, their huge dog Marmaduke. It was drawn by Brad Anderson from June of 1954 to 2015. So what’s that? 61 years of Marmaduke. All right, and here is what one review says of the comic and why most people don’t find Marmaduke very funny. “Each and every Marmaduke strip boils down to the same joke. Marmaduke is a large dog that does whatever he wants, much to the chagrin of everyone ever. That’s the comedic foundation for a strip that has run for over half a century. Everyone responds angrily to Marmaduke’s actions, often with an infuriated variation of, ‘Marmaduke. You’re a dog. Yet you’re acting like a human. But you’re not. You’re a dog.’ Regardless of the specifics, the non Marmaduke characters are always either annoyed or if they’re lucky merely curious about whatever situation the beast has gotten into that has thankfully distracted them from him ruining their lives.”
So I got a few here that I can just describe to you. We have the husband and wife on the couch holding up their trays of food above their heads so that Marmaduke won’t eat it, saying, “This is what I don’t like about eating off trays. Oh, Marmaduke.” Or you have Marmaduke at the bank putting a bunch of bones on the counter saying he wants to put his bones in safekeeping. “Marmaduke, you’re a dog, not a human. You can’t use a bank.” Another one here, Marmaduke puts his paws in a little girl’s basket of her bicycle, looks in all sad. “Sorry, Marmaduke, it’s been a long time since you could ride in the basket.” Marmaduke’s a big dog. He’s not a little dog. The end.
There’s so many here. I mean, it’s gone for 61 years of Marmaduke, and yet they still just do the same thing. “I’m pretty sure Mom asked me to take you for a walk.” The little kid is, and also in these strips, the size of Marmaduke, it’s somewhat variable, like here when he is with the kid, he literally looks like he’s 12 feet tall. So I mean, some Great Danes are huge. They’re giant dogs, no doubt. But then, I mean, there’s a similar one I have right next to it of Marmaduke standing on his hind legs to the mom and the mom’s saying, “No, no, no, I’m not going to carry you.” Oh goodness. So that’s the first one up there. If you like Marmaduke, well, maybe you just really like Great Danes. I don’t know.
The next one is The Family Circus, originally called The Family Circle, also family Go Around. So Family Circus cartoons are those ones that have, they’re the little kids drawn in the style, kind of like Dennis the Menace. It’s a syndicated comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Keane. Since Keane’s death in 2011, it’s written, inked, and rendered, colored, by his son, Jeff Keane. The strip generally uses a single captioned panel with a round border, hence the original name of the series, The Family Circle. Usually the Family Circle Comics or cartoons, it’s just one panel. And I remember when I worked at the Diocese of Phoenix, they had a bunch of Family Circus panels up on the walls and you walk down the halls of the chancery.
So I remember seeing those a lot because they’re very harmless. They’re very harmless cartoons, although they weren’t always that way. Back in the early 60s when Family Circle began, well, Family Circus, The Family Circle. Family Circus is what I call it now though, technically what it’s called now though, I believe it’s The Family Circus. Originally when it ran in the early ’60s it talked about divorce, it talked about the husband looks at other women. It was not as family friendly as it could be back in the ’60s, which was a lot of things back in the ’60s actually.
But it says here, according to it’s publisher, it is the most widely syndicated cartoon panel in the world appearing in 1500 newspapers. Compilations of Family Circus Comic strips have been sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. And usually a lot of it is just the kids. A lot of the humor is kids say the darnedest things. So it’s not that funny. It’s harmless. It’s the kind of thing you would put up at a diocesan chancellery. It’s harmless, good and decent fun, but it’s just not that funny.
So you have one here, you got the kid looking at grandma and she’s got a pot of chili and giving it to him. “Grandma, this chili you made isn’t chilly at all.” Whomp whomp. Let’s see here. “I’m having trouble with eagles in school. One plus one eagles two, two plus two eagles four.” Oh, look at that. She can’t pronounce things. Maybe she has a speech impediment. I don’t know, I guess it’s kids say the darnedest things or it’s cute, but a lot of it is also, it says here that, “Keane’s sentimental observations of an American nuclear family were sometimes criticized for being too saccharine.” According to Keane that’s exactly what he was looking for. “I don’t have to come up with a haha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat or tug at the heart, that’s more important to me than a laugh.”
So it’s okay to say Family Circus is not funny because it’s a comic that’s not meant to be funny. It’s more one, I guess that’s meant to be heartwarming. But the ones that aren’t heartwarming are like, “Oh, okay, kids say the darnedest things.” There’s one here, the husband says to the wife, “Smells good. What is it?” “It’s called I don’t know.” “Why would you call a beautiful casserole I don’t know.” “You’ll see.” And she goes to the kids, “What would everybody like for dinner?” “I don’t know.” “You got it.” Get it? Okay, okay. All right, So that’s Family Circus right there.
Now finally for the last one, what is an unfunny comic strip, and that’s going to be Garfield. Now I loved, at least I thought I loved Garfield, as a kid. I remember watching the Garfield television show a lot. My parents actually were able to record some of the episodes on Betamax. We were late to the VHS game. We had Betamax for a while, until Betamax lost out to VHS tapes during the personal recording wars of the late ’80s and the early ’90s.
So this article by Rose Eveleth in Smithsonian Magazine says, “It’s not just you. Garfield is not meant to be funny.” That when you read Garfield cartoons in the newspaper, they’re not really the funniest kinds of cartoons. We get it. Garfield hates Mondays. Garfield loves lasagna. Okay? When you look at the strips, it’s not really that funny because the creator Garfield was not trying to make a comic that was funny. He was really just trying to make money.
So this article on Jim Davis creator of Garfield says, “Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was a conscious effort to come up with a good marketable character he told the Washington Post in a 1982 interview. And primarily an animal. Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not. So Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn’t a strip for the nation’s 15 million cat owners. Then he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat. The model for Garfield was Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip’s early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny humorless monotony of Peanuts twilight years. After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect.”
There’s a funny story actually later of what Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, thought of Garfield. So I’ll read the excerpt to you. It says, “The author says, ‘About 25 years ago, I met a woman who worked for United Features Syndicate. UFS represented Peanuts as well as Garfield and countless other cartoons. We got to talking and she told me a story about her early days with the syndicate. She was hired to work on Peanuts business, licensing, merchandising. One of her assignments was to fly out to Santa Rosa, California, where Charles Schultz lived, stay in his house for a week, and establish a good relationship. After a couple of days, she was distraught because Schultz wasn’t warming up to her. Was she going to lose her job? Finally, after another day or so, he casually asked her, ‘What percentage of your time will we devoted to the Peanuts property?’ ‘100%,’ she assured him. ‘I was hired to work only on Peanuts. She could see the ice cracking already. He gave her a relieved look and said, ‘Good, because I think that cat is stupid.’ By the end of the week, they had a warm, trusting relationship.”
So yeah, the strips aren’t funny, but there is a hilarious bit of Garfield related humor. It’s darker, more existential humor that you can look at. And so go to garfieldminusgarfield.net. Garfieldminusgarfield.net. Other people have called it the Existential Crisis of Jon, who is Jon Arbuckle, Garfield’s owner. And it’s Garfield comic strips but Garfield has been removed from the strip so it just looks like that Jon is talking to himself. I don’t think it’s been updated in a while, but here is the most recent one that they put on there. It’s just Jon saying, “I’m so happy.” Smiles, nothing. “Now I’m depressed.” It’s like, “Oh my goodness.” “What a great morning. I feel like I can conquer the world. I rule.” And so there’s just something, or there’s just a blank one, a blank one, “Shouldn’t I be doing something?” So if you like just weird odd humor about that, Garfieldminusgarfield might be up your alley.
So all righty, those were the three strips, Garfield, Marmaduke, and The Family Circus. I don’t find them funny. Even the creators will admit, at least when it comes to The Family Circus and Garfield, they weren’t trying to be funny. If you find it to be funny, that’s great. And I hope that you enjoyed today. Not every comic is loved. Not every Free For All Friday episode is loved, but maybe you loved today’s episode. Who knows? Thank you guys so much for listening, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.