I remember an Andy Kaufman/performance art-type comic on Letterman back in the Eighties whose whole schtick was that he was the world’s biggest Family Circus fan. He made a return appearance where he showed off this Family Circus collection that Bil Keane sent him after seeing or hearing about his original appearance.
OK, I did laugh at this one a little.
Crankshaft is good? 
Crankshaft is good, but it’s not necessarily funny. It’s a story strip, not a joke strip.
The one I was wondering about there was Dilbert. It used to be good, but dried up a few years ago.
And the Castro storyline was an example of something that worked.:eek: I find Lio to be the far superior strip.
The big problem with these crappy comic strip is that the creators (or in several cases, the son/daughter of the creator,) keep making them because they keep getting paid. They might have chosen to retire years ago, but the newspapers keep paying them. The newspapers keep paying them, because whenever they get rid of strips like “The Lockhorns,” “Family Circus,” or “Marmaduke,” and replace them with newer and FUNNY (or at the very least innovatibe,) comics, they get thousands upon thousands of letters from old ladies claiming that “The Lockhorns,” “Family Circus,” or “Marmaduke” was their FAVORITE strip, and how DARE they get rid of it for something that’s offensive, or humor they “just don’t get.” These are the kind of people that not once ever laughed at a Far Side and don’t get why “Pearls before Swine,” isn’t 100% animal jokes (cause it has ANIMALS in it.)
I agree with whoever said earlier that as you get old you lose the ability to have a complex sense of humor.
Unfortunately, those older people are the biggest demographic for daily papers. So when they talk, the publishers listen. And when the publishers talk, the syndicates listen.
My theory is that certain comic strips are simply stable touchstones - always the same, day after day, since they were young. Whether they are funny or not is irrelevant, the important thing is that when one opens the newspaper they are still there, exactly the same as always, even as everything else grows incomprehensible.
I don’t believe it’s meant to be funny. It’s like the Doonesbury of the right. Every now and then, they sneak in a joke, but otherwise it’s just the cartoonist preaching his personal politics. Family Circus is the same thing, but with God instead of politics. At least in B.C., there are a bunch of actual gag strips in between the proselytizing strips.
Hey, Doonesbury is still pretty damned funny. At least as far as modern strips go.
Bill Holbrook has been coming up with new “animals doing human things” jokes for years now, in Kevin & Kell, so he proves at least that it can be done…it’s just that most people don’t have the talent to come up with fresh, funny material.
(here’s one of my favorites from the K&K archives)
I agree it used to be funny, but nowadays he can go quite a while with no humor, no punchline, just slamming home his political points. Then he’ll get a funny story line for a while, but that’s happening less and less frequently.
Isn’t that Jean Teasdale’s favorite strip?
As well as middle American housewives who collect Precious Moments and think Thomas Kinkaid is high art.