I guess that’s why they call them the funnies
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Dennis the Menace, 5/4/25
OK, obviously I was going to object that “Sunday school was awesome today!” is possibly the least menacing thing Dennis has ever said, but then I got to the big reveal of what he learned about: the pre-existence of souls, which was very explicitly anathematized by the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553. Last I dwelled on the question, I had decided that the Mitchells were high church Episcopalians, but apparently they’ve since fallen in with some kind of Origenist cult.
Hi and Lois, 5/4/25
Not sure if some diktat has gone out to the comics to do jokes about how fun it is to read the comics in the newspaper, as God intended, but I feel like today’s entry has been undermined by Chip’s legitimately exasperated attitude. You’re making a disaster of the fridge, Hi! It’s embarrassing when he brings girls over! Why not just add your favorites to your bookmarks on Comics Kingdom dot com, like a reasonable person?
Crankshaft, 5/4/25
Ha ha! Get it? April showers … bring May flowers? Get it???? Anyway, I hope these guys recognize Crankshaft’s many sins and choose to punish him with exile from the colony, or perhaps even hanging.
88 replies to “I guess that’s why they call them the funnies”
Crankshaft-Ed kidnapped a bunch of people and are holding them hostage forcing them to dress up as pilgrims.
Hi and Lois-“Oh Wilbur you and your wacky relationships.”
Six Chix-How about a joke?
MW-Dawn, have you been listening to Mary talk about the brain tummy again?
MW-“I know that Belle does this amazing thing with her tongue.”
FC-“GODDAMN YOU!”
Crankshaft:
“Do you seafarers have a favorite band?”
“The Skids!”
“Why? — no, don’t say it.”
“Yep. Plymouth Rock!”
Hi and Lois: Or use a printer, if you’re really desperate.
MW: Hey Wilbur: You can explore your relationship with Stabra here while she stays in a hotel. Away from your knives. There is absolutely no way they can’t hear her going all Leatherface in the next room.
Dennis: Dennis was in Heaven before he reincarnated.
Dennis being Mr. Wilson’s long dead father? VERY menacing.
Hi and Lois: Of course, it would be great if anyone in the family’s younger generation ever got an A on a test or some kind of sports honor, or even a congratulatory letter, that could be posted on the refrigerator. But until that day comes, at least Hi can laugh at slightly worse kids, like Dennis the Menace, or long-departed losers like Charlie Brown. Bet their refrigerators are sad as heck!
Crankshaft: Anachronisms are funny! Oh, and if you’re wondering why the Roanoke Colony disappeared? They were trying to get away from Crankshaft.
Mark Trail: The Eastern Hellbender, an enormous amphibian that breathes through its skin, is perfectly harmless, says Mark Trail during the first 10 minutes of a 90-minute horror movie.
Crankshaft: You know in cartoons, where when someone gets hit in the head and loses their memory, a second hit then makes them go back to normal? Well, I’m wondering if something like that happened to Batiuk. He wrote a goofy surrealist comedy comic, until one day a coyote dropped an anvil on his head and he started writing about cancer and golden age comics instead. But last night, a canary hit him on the head with a huge mallet, his memory returned, and now he’s back on the surrealism as if nothing ever happened. Lisa’s Story? What’s that?
DTM: By “Sunday school”, Dennis means “getting stoned and listening to System of a Down’s ‘Aerials'”.
Further proof that legacy strips exist in a alternate timeline, not one Star Wars joke.
Who’s more priggishly unenjoyable? Ed Crankshaft or a boatload of Puritans? You won’t want to stick around and find out!
Today’s Hi & Lois throwaway panels are the best joke of the day for bitter sarcastic Gen Xers.
H&L: Seeing his old man sitting in a chair saying in an exaggerated monotone “Ha Ha, Ha Ha” while reading newspaper funnies makes comics taped to the fridge the least embarrassing problem Chip faces when he brings home a girlfriend.
*sighs deeply* The joke in Crankshaft was pretty good.
MW: Wilbur’s solution is that Dawn let Belle cover her with lipstick mouths, then have sex with her?
RMMD: At least Kelly’s facial tic cleared up before her talk with Niki. It might have scared him.
DtM: So, Dennis’s parents had him because their church told them that there was an unborn baby in Heaven with their name on it? As a child-free by choice woman, that’s actually not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.
Hi and Lois – I tried rotating today’s Hi and Lois all the way through 360 degrees, but it was still never funny.
Crankshaft – Next we’ll find out Crankshaft’s neighbor on the other side is a guy named Noah Zark.
Don Abundio, translated:
“I’ve promised not to make any lewd remarks this evening”
“She can read semaphore?”
DtM: I suppose that there are many ecclesiastical interpretations of today’s strip, but I personally believe that Dennis’ Sunday school teacher was suggesting that Dennis was cast out of heaven and is in fact a fallen angel in league with Lucifer.
H&L: I know that it’s pointless to try and parse out the comics-within-comics universe that Hi and Lois exists in, but seeing Hi clip out those strips just makes me think of the Phantom Zone in Superman 2…
CShaft: I really wish they had gone with that other saying about April weather, ‘cuz I’d really like to see get come face to face with a lion.
MW: – “Call no man foe,” Stella Benson says, but maybe it’s still OK to call one a psychotic killer?
@Liam: On Six Chix
Cronically depressed cartoonists find it hard to make a joke.
Walker-Browne has declared war on Josh! “What if instead of a Comics Curmudgeon, there was a Comics Happy-go-lucky! Wouldn’t it be better?” Actually, no. Snarking is the only way left to enjoy “Hi & Lois”!
Slylock – It’s Barbie, right? That’s gotta be Barbie’s cabin.
Also, I love the idea of a band called The Six Differences.
@Hibbleton: Dawn’s got “a bad feeling” about something. That’ll have to do.
Sunday Mary Worth quotevestigation: Confirmed! “Call no man foe, but never love a stranger” is from Stella Benson’s “To the Unborn,” in her 1918 poetry collection “Twenty.” Benson was a recipient of the Benson medal which was founded by an unrelated Benson. She later wrote Goodbye Stranger (not the Supertramp song) which I suppose is in keeping with the sentiment expressed here.
Anyway while I am enjoying Belle’s demented tomato-chopping, cutting the tomatoes with a particularly homicidal knife does not in fact cause any harm to the person who will eat them. Dawn needn’t worry! I mean, she need, but not about the way Belle is chopping the tomatoes. I do wonder why Belle is chopping so many tomatoes for vegan blood pudding, which in every recipe I can find is made of black beans and no tomatoes. Here’s one from the aptly named recipestab. (Oh, “recipes tab.” whatever)
DtM: Wilson would burn the heretical Origenist writings in Dennis’ possession but knows that his present and likely future lack of literacy makes it a nonstarter.
@Ken: Belle is no man!
H&L: One of those comics strongly resembles “Beetle Bailey.” Beetle, of course, is Hi’s brother-in-law. If you think this will precipitate an existential crisis, wait’ll Hi gets to “Hi & Lois.”
JP: Decades ago when Dave Barry had a regular humour column I remember one riff on a guy’s ideal breakup scenario – the girlfriend pretty much reading his mind and saying what he’s secretly thinking so they can end it with no hard feelings. The reverse here is equally unbelievable but without a talented writer to make it funny. Although reusing art that brings back Magically-Shapeshifting-to-Oversized-Head-Lady in the background at least gives the strip a touch of the surreal.
RMMD On the more realistic side of breakups, it’s going to be hard to spell this out to Nikki since apparently he’s ignorant of any modern ways to stay in touch with a long-distance girlfriend and therefore hasn’t been texting or video calling to notice she’s not into him anymore. Guess he figured those unanswered weekly heartfelt letter he sent to “Kelly c/o Big College” were enough to keep the relationship going.
CS I will confess to chuckling at the original. But also thinking the town must have a party boat that (1) shouldn’t have been operating during bank-overflowing storms and (2) gets hired by some oddball reenactor groups
@Bob Tice: You know about The Skids? They are a bit of a cult band in the US. Thanks for the deep cut!
https://imgur.com/a/hacd2Fz
I had to read Josh’s comment a few times to figure out what it was getting at, and even then I had to squint at the comic to see the Pilgrim getups. Until then I couldn’t help but think that Crankshaft’s neighbors had decided that a few scattered showers were enough that they had to build an ark and gather two of every animal.
MW: “Cut! Dawn, for the last time, your line is ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’ Today is May the 4th!”
Luann: Phil’s the one who put her on hold.
Pluggers can’t even make *good* dad jokes.
@matt w:
recipestab
And there’s a picture of a big, phallic sausage with the brand name: V PUD
That was funnier than anything in The Funnies today!
MW: Anyone who predicted that Wilbur was going to respond to Dawn with a self centered gaslighting approach, make a drink of your choice and then chug the whole thing.
JP – Neddy, it’s time to pull the emergency hatch and leap out yourself! The Forth is clearly with Hank, and you must end this before the monopoly variants start!
Is the guy with the white patch of hair recording this event?
MW: Well, normal people would never phrase it like that, so I think we all know what Wilbur means by “exploring their relationship.” He’s back to bragging about his sexy, sexy sex life to his freakin’ daughter, who is clearly terrified of the stark raving lunatic going all slashy-slash a few feet away. Father of the year, I tell ya.
Oh, so that’s what today’s Crankshaft is about, and not Batiuk going insane, as I’d assumed.
Realistically, Dawn is an adult for all intents and purposes so she has no obligation to like Belle or get along with her. She does, however, have the right to feel safe in her own home and Wilbur is casually disregarding it because he wants to get laid by some crazy-eyed broad that he barely knows.
And I have no sympathy for Dawn because she was the one who decided that Wilbur was the “good parent.”
DTM: Of course, the _really_ menacing part was that before he was born, Dennis was trapped in the Confession Dial in a loop where he kept getting disintegrated and reintegrated over millions of years before finally escaping!
Dennis the Menace-And then Dennis got expelled from Heaven for rebelling against God. It was all covered in John Milton’s “Dennis the Menace”.
C’shaft: As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so the Puritans will take one look at the phone in Jeff’s hand, declare him a witch, and press him to death with stones. More weight, indeed!
DtM: The Mitchells are Mormons? I would think they’d have a larger family, but I guess the local stake president took one look at Dennis and said, “Nah, you guys are good.”
H&L: “I rotate them” indicates that Hi has an ever-growing collection of yellowing scraps of newsprint he keeps meticulously organized in order to have the proper comic strips on hand for the season and mood, and which the rest of the family endures only until he’s old/dead enough for them to throw it all in the trash without him caring.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Completely forgot! Excellent pick up on the date.
DT: Solid basic police work, chasing down leads, go over the story and accounts of witnesses or persons of interest – so the dragnet is closing in on Uncle, Auntie and the dum-dums. Still holding out that there will be one more twist (and not that only the dum-dums can drive a manual transmission) – that the insurance adjuster claim agent is in on the scam as well. While the pacing is slow at time, still applaud the effort by the guest writer.
MW: Dawn has made a huge mistake when she said to Wilber “How well do you really know her, dad?”. Remember, the Nosferatu can only enter one’s home if asked in – this is both a literal and figurative warning. And Dawn walks right into it.
Now Wilbur will in a humble brag manner and wildly inappropriate grin, start to elaborate. “Since you asked Dawn, we have been exploring such other’s soul and psyche, but mostly the carnal…” Soon Dawn is screaming “TMI, TMI”
RMMD: Well, I guess McStalker arc is all wrapped up and largely without RMMD or June, or the kids. Is this a trend? Over at MW, it appears MW may not appear until someone has been hauled off to jail, hospital or the morgue.
RMMD: “Kelly, you really should tell Niki about it because then maybe he’ll start stalking you. In all honesty, it’s kind of flattering. I got a little rush out of it.”
Luann: There’s no need to go through the frustration of being on hold, Luann. Just log on to their “easy to use” website, where they’ll reply to all your specific questions with generic answers.”
MW: “Dawnie, I’m not giving up the most insane sex I’ve ever had because of your little [air quotes] feelings. So chill or I’ll ship you back to your mother. And neither one of you wants that.”
Dustin: “Well then, if you don’t let me sit here, I’ll tell my husband that it’s *you* I’m having an affair with. So you’ve got no way out, Loser Boy.”
CS: Credit where it’s due, Batiuk executed that joke very well. No one mentioned The Mayflower, Cranky uttered no malapropism to drain the humor, and Pam didn’t say something like, “I see there’s a big ship in the yard.”
@Cleveland Mocks: Now, now, Wilbur has too little brain cells to send Dawn off to her mother. He’ll send her to the nice men wearing balaclavas that Belle knows. They’ll take “good care” of her to the point where she won’t want to leave, heh-heh.
@taig: This is more like the hyperbole that once made Crankshaft enjoyable to me – and that was present in the original Funky, which I also enjoyed. Like you say, they kept in simple.
Meanwhile, in Rex Morgan, MILF Diver, is Niki going to stalk Kelly and/or Travis. That could be interesting. I hope he brings a tire iron.
Dustin: “On the other hand, he might decide that you’re a creep who keeps coming on to me and won’t take no for an answer, and kill you for that. So as far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win.”
JP: Okay, I’m calling shenanigans. That plane has Southwest livery, but Southwest doesn’t fly out of Alaska–even assuming that Neddy would deign to fly a low-cost carrier in the first place.
Luann: Why is Luann on hold with the insurance company? That implies a level of personal responsibility and task management she has never once displayed. This should really be one of her parents.
MW: Yeesh, the men in Dawn’s life gaslight her so much she might as well wear a corset and a bustle.
“They sure look like Indigenous folks to me, William Bradford, and that one is wearing a ‘Chiefs’ hat. God says we can kill them all now.”
MW: I’m hoping against hope that Dawn’s “how well do you really know her” combined with her “what kind of name is Belle Batsfry’ right before falling asleep means that Dawn finally, finally, FINALLY did some Googling and has some very strong tea to drop on Wilbur.
It would be just like Moy to have skipped right over that in favor of a belated tell, just to get in more days of Belle going all Leatherface in the kitchen.
My esteem for Hi has fallen even lower! At least, when Dagwood Bumstead says “We need a bigger fridge”, he is interested on what’s inside!
I hate that the Winkerverse gods are so into laboured word play that they will tear open rifts into space and time, but they don’t think it through enough to reach into the multiverse so they can bring more than one and leaving them with “April showers bring Mayflower.”
***
Hi is either an older Millennial or the younger side of Gen X. Comics are supposed to be a heightened reality, but I refuse to believe there is anyone his age who reads a physical newspaper AND laughs out loud at the gag comics AND even cuts out a single one to stick to the fridge, let alone does this regularly. Hi and Lois is a strip that has me accepting that a pre-verbal baby has complex monologues in her head, but this is a bridge too far.
Why is the pre-existence of the soul a heresy? Because it would be absurd for God to create in heaven a soul with the original sin and without original sin there is no need for Christ. St. Augustine understood this, this is why he insisted that new soul are produced by the sexual act, going from father to child. Secular Christian apologist like Tom Holland (not the actor) argues that atheists are deluded, because Christianity is structural to the entire Western civilisation and inform the values and ideas of even secular people. Today’s “Dennis the Menace” shows that even nominal Christian have values and ideas that would be completely alien to a Christian of the first millennia or the early modern period, who would have started a genocidal war on topics such as this. Sorry Tom, secularisation is very menacing!
“Sunday school was awesome today! You know you don’t have children because God hates you? It’s in Leviticus!”
CS: Even by the strip’s degraded standards for wordplay and visual puns, this is a reach. Another case of “we get it, but it’s just not humorous at all.”
MW: “Just how well do I know her? Well I know she has a birthmark on-” :Dawn runs out of the apartment, trying her hardest not to vomit:
All of time and space are converging on a single point: Crankshaft’s grill. He’ll need to detonate it to jumpstart a new universe.
MW: “I sense hostility from her.” It looks like Dawn’s decided that, May 4th or no, she’s going to channel Counselor Troi instead.
With any luck this Mayflower will also bring infectious diseases, wiping out the Funkyverse!
Hi and Lois today is so preachy towards the conservation of an already dead media. It’s less a “joke” and just the writer venting his personal views. That’s usually Batiuk’s shtick, but Crankshaft is actually not bad today.
Reality is bending upon itself.
Tomorrow a giant cat head looming over the horizon will be singing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” while we all have a personal giant butterfly to carry us wherever we want to go.
@astroboy: MW: I’m hoping that Dawn’s “how well do you really know her” combined with her “what kind of name is Belle Batsfry” right before falling asleep means that Dawn finally, finally, FINALLY did some Googling and has some very strong tea to drop on Wilbur.
SPOILER ALERT: She didn’t, and she doesn’t.
Hi And Lois: It would be a great horror reveal if it turned out that the strips Hi is taping to their fridge are specifically Hi And Lois strips, including today’s, creating a recursive loop of nightmarish monotony that drives Chip to suicide.
Crankshaft: The timestorm created by Hi’s nonsense described above is already having consequences…
Crankshaft – I agree that Batiuk’s execution of this gag is much better than his usual running into the ground. Speaking of execution, I vote for pressing Crankshaft to death with heavy stones.
6Chix – If Tom Batiuk can dredge up a fifty year old joke and turn it into a passable strip, surely Xunise can come up with something.
Mary Worth – Please, please, please run to Mary for advice. Mary has to get involved before this story can end, and I’ve reached my limit.
Rex Morgan – “It’s over. I met a new guy at a mixer at the Dork Club.”
@astroboy: The fact that these troglodytes know how to use email is considered “progressive” since despite having a smartphone, Wilbur knows nothing about PayPal or CashApp and told that Meagan woman that he would pay for the “next date.”
At this posting, the Seattle Times has a “Non Sequitor” without the black lines.
It’s been a recurring problem.
But it’s really quite beautiful— in a French Impressionist water color way.
Check it out while it’s still up.
@UncleJeff: Wow, that’s gorgeous! It’s like a free trip to MOMA!
Thanks for the tip; I would never click on Non Sequitur without coercion.
(Actually reminds me of Roger de la Fresnaye’s The Conquest of the Air.)
@Dave:
MW: “I sense hostility from her.” It looks like Dawn’s decided that, May 4th or no, she’s going to channel Counselor Troi instead.
“I sense…..an itch!”
PV: So, Gwaine.
What was that “idiocy” the great chieftain insisted would upend his sensitive trade talks in Hibernian?
“He said it was about something called ‘tariffs’ but he couldn’t explain it and I didn’t understand it.”
“I gather the price of mead and wine will rise, so drink up, boys and girls”.
(And Val’s planned departure is postponed another week due to ‘general drunkenness’)
Sure, maybe Sunday school teaches about the pre-existence of the soul. But have we considered that the teacher was not talking about children in general, but just Dennis? Maybe the teacher meant to say that Dennis used to be angel in Heaven but then he was cast out on Earth for siding with Lucifer. That’s something a truly menacing child would brag about!
“You should go digital, dad!”
“Digital? You’re digital every day just because you cannot get a girlfriend!”
Many would think that these time-displaced Pilgrims will be horrified to see racially integrated USA. But consider that racial slavery was just being formed in the Anglo world and co-existed with other forms of unfree labour for a long time, so their racism would not be immediately recognisable to us. On the other hand, they would surely be horrified to see Irish and Catholics walking around unburned!
Objection! The hats the Pilgrims are wearing have metal buckles on the front, even though actual Pilgrims didn’t have buckles there. Yes, hard as it may be to believe, this comic about time travelling ships is not 100% realistic! I know, I’m as shocked as you are!
Cranky–This joke is so stupid that I didn’t get it until Josh explained it. Not sure if that says more about Batty or me, but I lean toward Batty.
https://imgur.com/a/QPuwSWX
@Morgan Wick: That’s an odd take. It looks nothing like standard depictions of the Biblical ark, but it does look a lot like the Mayflower.
Real Mayflower colonists would have had Crankshaft pressed to death with heavy stones, like poor old Giles Corey, not hanged. BTW, it’s not too late, people of Centerville…
Hi & Lois: Based on the looks of some of those comic strips, Hi likes to read a lot of Hagar and Beetle Bailey. So Hagar is a comic strip in their universe, and Beetle Bailey died and was Opus’d into a newspaper, where he has remained since. That is why he is still around and in a uniform the military hasn’t used in years. This explains a lot.
Crankshaft: I glanced at it, went “Huh. Boat. Pilgrims.” Then I scrolled on to the next comment without thinking “ark” OR “Mayflower.” That’s how much effort I devote to Batuik’s craft.
CS: Well, this is one thing they can’t blame on Crankshaft. Bean’s End doesn’t sell full size replicas of 17th Century sailing vessels.
Mr Wilson wishes that, some seven or so years ago, Dennis’s Dad had done the OTHER thing Origen is famous for.
DTM: I like the detail that George Wilson holds his newspaper the way a praying mantis might.
H&L: There. Is. Clearly. Space. Left. On. That. Refrigerator.
‘shaft: So … centuries-old ghost ships can just materialize in Crankshaft? That’s a thing that can happen? Reality has all the structural integrity of an old Kleenex? Fine. Be that way.
CS: Joke’s on you, Ed. That ain’t the Mayflower, it’s the Flying Dutchman. You’re condemned to sail the seas forever.
Fighting overwhelming urge to draw Dennis re-enacting popular Medieval motif of Origen castrating himself following a literal reading of Matthew 19:12.
Menacing enough to incur a schism across Christendom.
(gird thy loins before clicking) ?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Origen_emasculating_himself_%28MS._Douce_195%29.jpg
@ValdVin:
Their 1979 “Days of Europa” album has long been one of my absolute favorites. And no less an iconic personage than The Edge of U2 was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine not too long ago as identifying The Skids as one of his favorite bands, and “Days of Europa” as one of his favorite albums.
Crankshaft:
“Hey, Scott! Get on over here up from the cargo hold and answer this question: is it really you versus the world?”
“Listen, I’ve already made it to the main deck. Now, would you call that ‘Pilgrim‘s Progress’?”
Crankshaft:
“Yoo hoo up there! Myles! Don’t be so Stand-off-ish!”
CS: After being condemned to wander the oceans for 400 years, the Pilgrims finally think they’ve been released from hell, only to wash up on Crankshaft’s property.
@Dyna Moe: Ya never know what yer gonna see when you visit joshreads.com
Sometimes you wish you didn’t see what you saw.
With the collapse of the Funky Winkerbean timeline as a nessecary counterbalance Crankshaft has begun spiralling off its axis, collapsing in around Ed Crankshaft, the fabric of reality twisting itself, lathe of heaven like, around his malapropisms. Unfortunately Crankshaft has too much addled self assurance to question any of this so things will likely continue to degrade until his whole universe collapses, probably into a widening gyro sandwich or something equally groanworthy.