Free Bread and Circuses

Sweet Jesus, do I hate The Family Circus! How does this thing stay in print? I've never encountered a less observant, less inspired, less relevant waste-of-ink-and-paper piece of tripe in my life.

Look, I don't care that it's bad. I don't care that it's not funny -- the so-called "funny" pages are chock full of strips that don't technically qualify. But I wouldn't paper my birdcage with The Family Circus, for fear that my birds would rather kill themselves than have to look down between their legs at the never-ending mundanity of those rotund little pig-faced brats and their painfully uncharismatic parents -- all of which serves to make mediocrity look like a lofty goal.

Is there nobody in the entire universe of this comic strip who has anything interesting to say? Or can say it with any kind of wit, or style, or charm?

Never in the history of comicdom has a strip so consistently and convincingly chronicled the utterly forgettable, innocuous non-events in the lives of such cretinous caricatures of white-bred, Middle-American pap. If "bland" had a mascot, it would be The Family Circus.

But the worst thing about The Family Circus is the recycling of gags -- and believe me, I realize that even calling them "gags" elevates them to a literary status they have not earned... The attempts at humor in The Family Circus make the comics in Bazooka Joe gum look like Jonathan Swift. Compared to The Family Circus, the inside of a Laffy Taffy wrapper reads like the script to then next Judd Apatow movie. But it is in the repetition of these tired bits that we see how creatively bankrupt this strip -- and its creator, the ironically homonymed Bill Keane -- really are.

The first droplet in the water torture of the soul that is The Family Circus is this familiar set-up: A lamp, or vase, or tchotchke lays on the ground in pieces, and the fat little Family Circus kids stand about bewildered, shoulders shrugged: "Not me!" "Not me!" Meanwhile, a malevolent little poltergeist with the words "Not Me" branded on his chest scampers out of the frame. This scenario brought maybe a quarter of a chuckle to my face when I was seven years old. But in the eighty or ninety times I've seen it resurrected since then... well, to say it's worn thin is akin to saying Lindsay Lohan enjoys a drink now and then.

The second track on this Family Circus "greatest misses" album contains all of the insulting non-humor of a regular strip, but it carries this disclaimer: "Bill Keane took the day off. Today's strip was drawn by Billy." And now, the familiar Norman-Rockwell-without-all-the-grit-or-edge line drawings are replaced by crude stick figures. This man is getting paid a good sum of money (too much!) to create drawings with all of the skill of a retarded kid using his non-dominant hand!

But worse, still, is Sunday, when The Family Circus breaks free from its single, coffee mug ring sized panel, and runs rampant over a quarter-page of newspaper, the pig-faced little gnomes brought to life through the magic of four-color printing. And you can't go a month of Sundays without seeing a retread of this gem: The entire strip is a map of the neighborhood, with a dotted line detailing everywhere the kids went that day: over a fence, up a tree, across the monkey bars... It's like some terrorist training camp.

(And why is it that whenever we see B-roll of a terrorist training camp on the news, they're always on the monkey bars? Is that a skill that's useful to ANYONE besides someone who's actually playing on the monkey bars? Am I missing something? I mean, is THAT the dirty little secret of why 9/11 happened? That their guys had simply logged more hours on the monkey bars than ours had? But I digress...)

So you're telling me the kids ran around outside? That's what you spent time drawing? That's what you want to share with us? THAT'S what your time on this planet has taught you about humanity!? That kids run around outside!?!? Well, hey buddy, thanks for the insight! You're like Jane Goodall with the Gorillas. How do ya do it?

Oh, for crying outside! Terry Schiavo was a more compelling storyteller!

And the worst part is, I can't look away. If I get the chance to read the paper (which is rare, because you drive everywhere in LA. -- reading the paper on the train is one of the things I miss most about Chicago), I'll eventually flip to the comics page. And I can't help but look. It's a car crash, and I can't turn away. It's a scab I can't help but pick... A sore in my mouth I can't seem to keep my tongue away from. And it never gets better.

Who is this strip for? Who is entertained by this? I don't know, but I'll tell you this much: If you like The Family Circus, not only can we not be friends, but I'm going to look into having you put down. Because you're just taking up space, and using gas and air that could be better put to use by people with two brain cells to rub together.

And don't start in with, "You don't have kids, so you don't understand." Because I know LOTS of kids, and even more importantly, I WAS a kid, okay? The fact that I don't have kids doesn't keep me from enjoying Dennis the Menace. It didn't keep me from enjoying the bejeezus out of Calvin & Hobbes -- a far superior strip that was smart, clever, honest, had as much to say about childhood as it did about man's place in the world, and placed a premium on imagination.

Imagination, there's a concept. And one that is sorely lacking in the world of stick figures, drawings of terrorist training camps, and a mischievous little spook named "Not Me".