What are the strips that are the least funny to you Dopers? Not necessarily the ones that you don’t “get,” but the ones that are just stupid or ooze a lack of talent. These are my choices, in no particular order:
Non-Sequiter: I can’t help but imagine that this strip is drawn by a bitter old man who hates everybody and spends his entire day complaining about every little inconvenience.
Doonsbury: If this guy ever had an original idea, maybe he’d realize how much of a hack artist he is and stop drawing this pathetic strip.
Zippy the Pinhead: What the…? I have no idea how this guy comes up with his material, but I’m guessing that alot of LSD is involved :D.
What do you guys think? What are you least amusing strips?
I can’t believe Diceman just knocked Doonesbury. That’s some funny oregano he’s smoking.
I’ll agree with Non Sequitur, which is in fact pretty stupid. But Eve hit the nail on the head with the Family Circus. There used to be a great strip called the Dysfunctional Family Circus, available on the internet. The premise was that the Family Circus would be a lot more interesting if there were kinky sex taking place offstage. So just imagine the saccharine message of TFC with someone getting anal in the background. Terrific. Bill Keane, the bastard, had the site taken down.
Actually, this is one of my favorites. It’s cynical, but I wouldn’t call it bitter.
I hate Garfield. Talk about rehashing the same jokes over and over. I agree with you about Zippy and Doonesbury. It’s hard to laugh at something that is barely comprehensible. Another bad one is Mallard Fillmore, a strip whose idea of political commentary basically boils down to saying “Republicans are stupid” and “Newt Gingrich sucks”
Oh, and we all know Family Circus is evil. That’s just a given.
Say what??? Mallard Fillmore is the most right-wing comic strip in existence! It bashes Democrats, liberals, Clinton and Gore…not Republicans and Gingrich.
My vote for world’s worst strip is Kudzu. The guy has a few stock jokes and then recycles them over and over. I mean, there’s beating a dead horse, and then there’s beating the bloody pieces of horse-flesh that used to once be an entire equine corpse…and then there’s Kudzu.
The New York Daily News runs four pages of comics daily, and there are some real stinkeroos in there. Thank god, no Garfield or Kudzu, though.
The one that seems to irritate me the most these days is Cathy. What’s going on between her and that little rat dog of hers? Are they having sex or something?
We did have a thread on this subject a while back, but I’m all for piling more scorn on bad comics. My vote(s) go to all those assembly-line comics that have been around waaay too long:
BC
Beetle Bailey
Wizard of Id
Blondie
Running the same stupid old jokes every week for 40 or 50 years gets a tad dull.
Just had to check out Mallard Fillmore, and I must say, WTF? Even when they made fun of something I’m also against, I found it incredibly stupid.
It seems they want to make a political statement in each strip, and they’re way of making it “funny” is to just make the statement, but add plenty of ellipses, as though the readers would say, “Wow, that would just be some boring political statement, but with those ellipses, I laughed till my sides hurt!”
First of all, Zippy is genius. I don’t care what anyone says.
Now that that’s out of the way:
Curtis. Just dumb. dumb dumb dumb. and more dumb.
Top Secrets, by Paul Szep, who was (I thought) a pretty talented political cartoonist, but this just blows. I don’t know how many people have it, but it’s awful.
I agree about Mallard Fillmore. I imagine the author saying “you don’t like it 'cause you’re liberal!” and myself saying “no, I don’t like it because it’s RETARDED.”
Thank you JeffB!!!
I was scanning all these responses thinking, oh, but I like Doonsebury, and yea, Cathy is insipid, etc, etc, but NONE hold a candle to Nancy. the not at all funny when the original guy did it, and now it’s so painfully not funny - and what’s WORSE:::::::
I CAN’T stop my eyes from going over it. Gadz.
It’s wierd. I HATE the sucker, never even get close to a smile, but I can’t seem to force my eyes to skip over it. Now, I routinely skip over lots of other comic (mostly the Rex Reed type of thing), but why, oh why can’t my eyes stop actually scanning the words to that strip???
Yeah, but the new Nancy guy draws Aunt Fritzie a lot hotter.
BC is annoying and stale, but there’s a morbid fascination to the more overtly Christian strips. Especially around Good Friday, when the fetid stench of Our Savior’s blood seems to actually rise from the funny papers.
I forgot to mention one strip that’s been going on for nearly thirty years, and has NEVER been funny, and NEVER anything less than fingernails-on-the-blackboard excruciating. I refer, of course, to the benighted Crock.
I’d vote for anything that appears in the clarion ledger. Our local newspaper blows.
I’m embarrased by both Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore.
I think Crankshaft is boring.
I think Helen, sweetheart of the internet, is a bitch.
I think Dilbert is a fucking dipwad loser.
I’ve forgotten the name of this one, but it’s with the black kids and all. It had one interesting one the other day. One. Sheesh.
First of all, the fact that Family Circus is devoid of talent goes without saying. Putting it down too vigorously here feels too much like picking on the gimpy kid with the bow tie.
But I’ll second Cathy.
Cathy: "I have too much unanswered mail, my romantic life is stalled, my mother is strange, my dog is cute, calories, cel phone, closet, clothes, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah … " at this point my eyes cross and the panels merge in to a gigantic ink blob.
And speaking of ink-blobs. Sylvia by Nicole Hollander. I don’t even know if this is national. It’s in the SF Examiner. I’ve never been able to get past more than two or three words. And the artwork looks like a Rorschach Test.
Oh, you mean the strip in general. Yeah, it’s seriously lost its edge. It was funniest in its earlier days, when Dogbert could get nominated for the Supreme Court and dinosaurs could be found living behind the couch and seek advice on how to have an egg. The business jokes were good for a while, but it’s gotten way too repetetive lately.
You’ve got to be referring to “The Boondocks.” I’ve found it to be a mixed bag…some days it royally sucks, and some days it’s pretty darned decent. I must say, though, that there’s never been a “Boondocks” strip that I’ve thought of as “great.”
Zippy is great. It used to be funnier, but it’s stil lgreat. One of my favorite strips was where Zippy was scared and frightened. When Griffy asked him what was wrong. Zippy went “It’s Marmaduke, I just don’t get it”. Hilarious stuff.
Also Boondocks is usually pretty funny. And at least it has the balls to do stuff other strips wouldn’t dream of. There was one where the boy was talking to his father, BET was doing their own version of “Who wants to be a millionare” the show was called “Who wants 20 bucks and a bus ticket home”
Anyway. The worst strip has to be Luann. I don’t know if it’s mostly local or not, but it is seriously unfunny. It’s about a 15 year old girl growing up.
Our local newspaper blows.