Bullet Points: The 8 Least Funny Comic Strips

 

•Garfield

 

 

I'll save you from ever having to read another Garfield: 1) Garfield is fat because he loves lasagna and sleeping, 2) Garfield is not fond of the dog, Odie, 3) Garfield's owner, Jon, is a loser.  Unless you think it's funny to count the number of times creator Jim Davis can draw a punchline from a cat's enjoyment of baked pasta -- or you just find it funny that somebody thinks there's a world in which that's an acceptable punchline -- Garfield should not be the strip for you.  To be completely fair, once in a blue moon Garfield will come up with something so out of left field that you won't be able to keep yourself from at least amusedly shaking your head slowly, but it's not worth the intermediate 1,000 days of purgatory.

•Cathy 

 

Cathy is to single working women as ________ is to _________.

1. Lisa Marie Nowak; astronauts.
2. Flavor Flav; black people.
   
3. Auschwitz; comedy.
   
4. I hate Cathy.

The answer, of course, is the unlisted 5th option:  I took the SATs eight years ago and never intend to answer another multiple choice analogy question.  The interesting thing about this Cathy write-up is that I've already made five jokes, which is four more jokes than have ever been in a Cathy strip.  The one joke, in case you're wondering, is that she's always sweating.

 

•Mary Worth

 

Okay, we're lacking in capacity here; we KNOW "Mary Worth" isn't supposed to be funny. It's one of those "serious" comic strips, like "Prince Valiant," "Apartment 3G" and "The Phantom." But unlike those other strips, which are either interesting or so bad they're funny, "Mary Worth" is so fucking bad it's funny but then not funny again.

The 68-year-old comic strip is about an old lady who is extremely nosy and fucks with peoples lives. It's all the bad advice of an "Ann Landers" or "Dear Abbey" column... set to PICTURES!

•Marmaduke

Aren't dogs funny? But they sure are a pain in the butt, right? You always have to, y'know, walk 'em and feed 'em all that shit (well you don't HAVE to do anything, but they might die if you don't do that stuff). So how can you get all the humor of dog ownership without the headaches that come along with it? By reading "Marmaduke," of course!

Or we at least think that's the intent of the shockingly unfunny 54-year-old comic strip. Brad Anderson's daily comic stars Marmaduke, a great dane with a GREAT sense of humor, and his family, Dottie, Phil, Barbara and Billy. While those more creative than us read "psycho-sexual" subtext in the comic we just see a recognizable character and little else. As the crew at "Marmaduke Explained" put it: "Brad Anderson, what is wrong with you... what are the dogcatchers even talking about and why is their truck floating... everything you create is cancer and madness. How are you still alive?"

•The Family Circus 

 

 

Isn't it funny when little kids mispronounce words?  No?  Well, how about when little kids misspell words?  No?  How about the fact that little kids don't understand anything?  That's more sad and frustrating than funny.  Well, don't you think it's funny how little kids can play all day?  No?  Fuck.  Is it funny when little kids miss their dead grandparents?  Maybe a little, but when that's the funniest thing going for a comic strip, you know you're in trouble, and you know you're reading Family Circus: the only place in comics where three kids with identical personalities do all the things that make little kids mostly intolerable in real life.  

•Ziggy

 

In order to appreciate Ziggy, you have to understand that the concept of Ziggy is that nothing ever goes right for Ziggy, and then you need to knowledge that Ziggy has been running for almost 37 years.  That means that, every day, one of the Tom Wilsons has to come up with another bad thing to happen to Ziggy.  There are never any jokes.  What this means, in sum, is that all the normal bad things to happen to Ziggy ran out about 36 years ago, and now the things that happen to Ziggy are completely absurd (an asteroid lands on his computer, his parrot makes fun of him for it; a truckload of Velveeta arrives on his doorstep, his parrot makes fun of him for it).  In this context, I am always compelled, whenever I see a comics section, to seek out Ziggy specifically so I can laugh at the fact that it's still running.

•Momma

 

Imagine all the desperate feminine striving of Cathy put placed inside your grandma. That's pretty much Mell Lazarus' "Momma" in a turd-encrusted nutshell. In addition to being dismally uninteresting and horribly drawn, "Momma" begs to be placed on this list because of its anti-semetic subtext. As the Comic Strip Doctor points out, Mr. Lazarus is attempting to skew his mother and in doing so places all the stereotypes of aging Jewish women into newspapers every day.

•The New Yorker's Cartoons

 

 

It's well documented that "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz' cartoons were rejected from "The New Yorker" several times. While Mr. Schulz picked himself up after the rejection and created one of the only truly funny comic strips ever, "The New Yorker" remains a two faced beast--on one hand, it publishes some of the finest examples of journalism and cultural criticism available. On the other, it fills its remaining space with some of the most unfunny comics that have ever been committed to paper.

"The New Yorker's" cartoons are so ubiquitously bad,  "Seinfeld" tackled the subject. Ouch. "The New Yorker" cartoons are, perhaps, the worst offenders on this list because they operate under the guise that they are intelligent. If you don't laugh at a "Garfield," you know the problem is with Jim Davis and his utter lack of creativity. But "The New Yorker's" cartoons have the balls to smugly insinuate that if you don't find them funny, the problem is on your end. "Dumb ass!" the cartoon taunts. "Can't figure out a cartoon?!"

Well you know what, cartoon? I might just come down to where you work and pee in your mouth. How would you like that? Don't have anything smugly witty to say now, do you? Thought so.