The champ: Gasoline Alley. Man, was that ever funny? Even if it used to be, sometime during the Hoover administration, that’s no reason to keep it running; it’s just a bunch of nothing mixed with “gosh, we sure are old now!” for filler.
Hijack, because I was thinking about this the other day: Why is it that, by and large, conservatives have such a hard time being funny? There’s Mallard, that Fox News comedy show that lasted, what, 1 episode?, that spoof movie from last year with Chris Farley’s brother playing a Michael Moore character - what’s up? P.J. O’Rourke manages (managed? - haven’t read him since high school) to be funny, and I’m sure there must be some conservative stand-ups that are good, but broadly speaking, comedy seems to belong to the lefties. Maybe I should have just started a separate thread. Sorry.
I rarely see it, but I freaking LOVE Mallard Fillmore. It is so woefully unfunny that it is hysterical. It strikes me as coming from a bunch of overweight, over 60 Republicans sitting around trying to be “cool.”
I know. It leaves me wishing that I could draw…at all. I now have the desire to use zombies in a webcomic to poke fun at music, much like the rarely updated, seemingly yet again defunct Indie Tits strip. Alas, I have all the drawing skills of a promising 5th grader.
Good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself.
Maybe I’ll have to go into stand-up just to make up the deficit.
Probably they couldn’t. I don’t know why, but there just don’t seem to be any funny American conservatives. Editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez is not funny. Wayne Stayskal is so lame it’s embarrassing. So is Dennis Miller ever since he left SNL. P.J. O’Rourke has his moments, but he has not been very funny since his National Lampoon days. I haven’t heard a funny RW standup since Sam Kinnison died, if he even counts; I’ve heard some bits by “Christian comedians” and they’re not funny.
Can’t believe you left out The Family Circus! (The sole redeeming feature of which is that it mutation-spawned The Dysfunctional Family Circus.)
Perhaps there’s a fine line between “look how silly those guys are!” and “look how morally superior we are!” and conservatives are more prone to cross it. The former has comic potential, the latter less so.
Sixteen years of Bushes and a lot of good subject material, particularly the last eight. Eight years of Clinton, and how many jokes can you make about fellatio? Maybe they’ll get some good jokes about Obama.
Why doesn’t Keane go after Pastis? That arc where Rat was kidnapped at a FC convention was great.
It really stopped being a humor strip with the arrival of Skeezix in 1921. Then it became something of a soap opera/adventure strip with humorous sidelights – the formula for its success.
Nearly all continuity strips are zombies, killed by the necessities of plotting around a newspaper.
P.J.'s first couple of books were very funny, and then he went downhill, and I gave up. He wasn’t funny at all on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me - a bit unfunnier than Amy Dickinson, IMO.
When I read National Review in the late '60s, early '70s it had some (intentionally) funny bits. But Tinsley can’t be funny even when liberals do something stupid that could legitimately be made fun of. Pretty sad.
My paper carries this because it is a sister paper of the Oakland Tribune, and the artist lives in Oakland. More stereotypes in this one than in the rest of the comic section combined.
Blondie has updated to the more or less present, but I’m for keeping it as long as they keep drawing her as hot as they have been.
I never meant to say they weren’t great strips…I have a bookshelf full of ***Peanuts ***and Calvin and Hobbes. But neither strip is being continued. Peanuts, because Shulz is obviously gone, and C+H because Watterson retired it. Its only my opinion, but I think the limited space of the comic pages could be better used if it were devoted to newer strips. Just sayin’.
Jayjay, yep, I frequent the Comics Curmudgeon site at times. Which actually reminds me of some strips I forgot to mention that I really wish would go away. I knowthey won’t, but their sole entertainment value is only found at places like the Curmudgeon site:
Crock: Ok, even as a kid when I first saw Crock I trhought it was lame. Really lame. Its badly drawn and the jokes are horrible. I would be really shocked to find that anyone actually enjoys it.
Cathy: ACK! Or as I’ve seen it said on the CC site “Cathy must die”.
As for Family Circus, I’m sure that someone out there is a big fan of it. Deranged soccer mom or something.
**
I still love Peanuts, it’s in the top 5 of my favorite comic strips. Though some are better than others. And though I’ve read it for years, there are some that are new to me, though they’re 30 years old. I’d like to read new, funny, cutting edge comic strips, where are they??? Online, I suppose. Gil Thorp and Gasoline Alley can’t be budged from the newspaper…
Daily Ink has “vintage” comics. I like Buzz Sawyer, the last year or so I read on Sundays visiting my Grandmother, and Flash Gordon, but I guess the web is much different from taking up space in the newspaper. Our Conservative paper here ran Doonesbury as the only comic in the business section. Go figure.
1930. Blondie started out as a flapper named Blondie Boopadoop; Dagwood was a wealthy scion who gave up the Bumstead family fortune to marry her.