If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I can only add that Peanuts had arguably the richest cast of any newspaper comic strip; that it was the first strip to seriously mine the humor in anxiety, failure, and heartbreak; that it was often breathtakingly surreal and uninhibited; and that it was superbly drawn by a true master of the craft. And, it goes without saying, it was often terrifically funny. YMMV, of course.
Horrible things have happened to the local comics page here:
-
Pulled Zippy the Pinhead which was the main reason I even read the comics page
-
Shrunk the color comics page to a 4-page spread that leads off with For Better or Worse and even includes Beetle Bailey :eek:
-
Also pulled Shoe which was about the only comic that gave me a chuckle every now and then
-
The strips are printed so small that a magnifying glass would come in handy. Part of the fun of the Sunday comics was to see your favorite strip “Full Size”
I’m starting to wonder why they even bother.
I think I will head over to their website to complain…I’m in a complaining mood today.
I’d eliminate the “soap opera” strips. Does anyone really read them?
Those that aim at humor can stay - even the ones that I don’t find funny - because they occasionally say something that’s actually amusing. I agree that they’ve all gone downhill over the years.
I wouldn’t discount political humor as a viable form of humor, and it’s certainly based on more than “being pissed along with them.” However, for me, the appeal of all the comics I mentioned is never solely, or even primarily, the politics. For instance, the humor of some of my favorite Boondocks comes from the characters and their interactions - the series of Valentine’s strips with Jazmine and Huey a couple weeks back were hilarious, and Riley’s thug posturing never gets old. Compare this to Mallard Fillmore - the strip isn’t unfunny because of the politics - even the non-political strips are lame.
The Houston Chronicle seems to run just about every strip currently available in syndication (except the one that launched this thread, which I’ve never heard of), and the only ones that ever even make me smile occasionally are “Pearls before Swine” and “Get Fuzzy”.
Under “guilty pleasures” I’ll classify “One Big Happy”, which has a slightly interesting subversive streak running though its cliched suburban jokes, and “Drabble”, which I find endearingly goofy at times despite appearing to have been drawn by someone with advanced Parkinson’s.
Sorry to repeat previous mentions, but the two absolute worst strips I can think of, from the standpoint of Trying to be Funny But Failing Miserably Every Single Time, are “Cathy” and “Mallard Fillmore”. “Cathy” also gets the nod for all-time most spectacularly inept drawing technique, narrowly edging out the aforementioned “Drabble”.
Maybe, I suspect it will depend on which paper you are reading. I have only had a few brief meetings with pulp paper in the last ten years so it is entirely possible I had a bad run of luck. I would still be willing to bet that the net is where it is at.
(And thank you Zsofia, I’ll be checking that out. I had thought RSS was for converting blogs into tickers and mobile-phone formats. Perhaps it matured since I last paid attention. (And I’m in the industry!))
Not funny most of the time but can make a good point: Mallard Fillmore, Boondocks (I admit both of these serve to prick the balloons of the “other side”, and I admit Boondocks is better at it, but he uses too much racial humor to be funny to me. The duck is just lame- getting all of his positical points by putting up strawmen, putting words in their mouths and then knocking them down. So, if you like their policits, you likely agree with the strips, theu to you they are “funny”. But they very rarely are. Sometimes they are “pointed”. )
Was funny, still shows flashes of old greatness, still makes a political point once in a while: Doonesbury
Was once funny, now isn’t: Peanuts, Garfield, Overboard, Cathy, Monty (when there was Robotman), Blondie, Zippy the Pinhead. I still read them, get an occasioanl small grin.
Never Funny, ever, ever, ever:The Duplex, Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, Baby Blues (if they have such huge problems with kids- why are they still having them? Waste of paper garbage.
Sometimes very funny, otherwise “eh”: Dilbert, Non Sequitur, Rhymes with Orange, Rose is Rose, Piranha club, Luann, Pickles, Meaning of Lila, The Other Coast, Pooch Cafe.
Mostly Funny: Get Fuzzy, Rose is Rose, Sally Forth, Shermans Lagoon, Foxtrot.
Would be more funny if I could tell the charcaters apart (which I can’t):For Better or for Worse.
I wanna stick up for “Close to Home.” My newspaper doesn’t carry it, so I can’t say whether or not it’s gone downhill lately, but based on the books and page-a-day calendars I’ve read, it can be pretty funny sometimes. Sure, it’s hit-or-miss, and it’s not The Far Side or Bizarro, but it’s hardly “the ultimate crappy comic.”
In evidence, here are a few of the many that have amused me:[ul]
[li]To give himself a perfect excuse whenever he was pulled over for speeding, Mario kept a live hornet in a jar in his glove compartment. (Picture of Mario screaming "Aaaah! Hornet! Hornet in the car!)[/li][li]Having passed his civil service exam, aspiring mailman Tim Wasniak now had to run the “Gauntlet of Rotweilers.”[/li][li]Tensions mounted in the office as a gang of PC users strayed into the Mac users’ turf. (Picture of two groups of nerdly office workers angrily staring each other down.)[/li][li]Having worked at a fast-food drive-through window for nine years, Helen took a job in hospital admissions.(Helen, sitting behind the desk at the Emergency Room, is saying to a man who has staggered in with several arrows sticking out of his back, “Welcome to Westfield Memorial Hospital! Can I interest you in a hip replacement today?”)[/li][li]St. Peter, to a man who is headed out through the gate to Heaven: “Whoa! Hold up. You need to get your hand stamped.”[/li][/ul]
Oh, absolutely, it does not make any sense at all unless you are high, and then…
For the past few years, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running a Sunday-only strip called “Cleats”. It’s about a little-league soccer team. It ran for two full years, with every single strip being about soccer. OK, so that’s the theme of the strip, that’s fine. I can accept that a lot of the gags will be about soccer. But every single one?
Well, apparently someone told the cartoonist this. So now, for the past three months, the strip has had nothing to do with soccer at all. Um, could we maybe find a happy medium here?
As for proof that the comics are not all bad, I’m surprised that nobody in this thread has yet nominated Frazz. Frazz is, I think, to the current comics page what Calvin and Hobbes was in its era, and what Bloom County was before that. It’s intellectual, cultured, and philosophical, and almost always funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.
Yeah, Frazz is great. So of course, The Indianapolis Star had to replace it with Baldo. Ugh.
Dorothy: Apartment 2G!?! My goodness, I haven’t read that in 30 years.
Blanche: Let me catch you up. It’s later that same day…
[/golden girls]
I think I’m with a lot of posters here who have made a lifelong habit of reading unfunny, unentertaining comic strips. God knows why we persist. “Close to Home” may well be bad – I don’t know, and yet it’s also possible that I read it every day. Can someone tell me whether it appears in the Boston Globe or not?
Speaking of bad comics, has anyone seem the latest incarnation of Spider Man? It’s suddenly begun appearing in the Globe. It beggars belief that a strip so inspid and so poorly drawn can be taken up by a major metropolitan newspaper. There must be more to the comics business – as a business – than meets the eye of the casual reader.
If you’ve never read the strip, kick back, grab a drink, and go through the archive. There’s a LOT of funny stuff there. You’ll be scratching your head wondering how the guy can be that funny and still write Sally Forth.
Did any of you ever get an abomination called Liberty Meadows? I read it every day while it was in our paper, hopng it would be funny one time. It never was. Eventually, it was replaced.
I also second the mention of Opus.
I can’t remember ever getting a good laugh out of Sally Forth.
Another vote for Mallard Fillmore.
But I think Dilbert remains funny.
It’s funny when it’s just Zippy. (See this one: Zippy The Pinhead: Sunday, 02/26/06) “Griffy” should keep himself out of it.
Hunh? Liberty Meadows is brilliant IMO. Fantastic art, funny talking animals, and hot chicks with big boobs. What’s not to like?
I liked it better when it was Bloom County.