alt title(s): Family Circus
Todd Gaines:There you are, enjoying your comics, when all of a sudden there's the Family Circus just waiting to suck, and ruin your whole experience.
Claire:Then why don't you just not read it?
Todd Gaines:I hate it, but I'm compelled to read it.
— Dialogue from the movie Go
The sweet, heartwarming
comic strip that everybody loves to hate.
In its literal form, Bil Keane's
The Family Circus (originally
The Family Circle) is about the innocent, childlike adventures of young siblings Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and infant P.J. Occasionally, parents Bil and Thel will contribute some insightful comment about the children's exploits, like when they all were imitating
Wayne's World and Bil says "Makes sense to me. NOT."
Other characters include random neighbor children, pets, extended family members
(many of whom are dead), and various
ghosts representing childhood excuses. A standard
Family Circus trope is for a parent to ask the children who broke something, only for them all to say "not me"... just as a ghost named "Not Me" flees the scene, damning evidence of the crime in hand.
Now that's satire!
Rather than creating a multi-panel story, Family Circus Sunday strips would often feature single drawings of long, meandering paths that one of the children took to achieve some end (the dotted lines also periodically show up in the daily "circle" panels as well, again denoting a path). It's been parodied rather frequently in other comics.
Besides little kids, the sincere fanbase for the comic seems to be moms and grandmas who love the domestic slice-of-life humor of writers like the late Erma Bombeck; in fact, she and Keane were friends. One of Keane's sons, Glen, became a top animator at Disney (the lead animator on Ariel, the Beast, Pocahontas, and John Silver, among others). Another son, Jeff, now assists his dad with the comic.
While it's ostensibly a humorous comic strip with a wide circulation,
Family Circus is more popular as the butt of jokes. Amazon.com's user-contributed book reviews are infamous for containing snarky reviews of Family Circus books. Such reviews usually fawn over the tremendous symbolism and/or deep philosophical meaning in Family Circus' obvious, single-panel storylines, often discovering hidden
Freudian or
religious symbolism. In the
Diary of a Wimpy Kid novels, which are aimed at preteens, it's parodied as
Li'l Cutie.
The early days of the
Internet World Wide Web (1995-99) saw a web feature called
Dysfunctional Family Circus. Family Circus strips were posted without the original caption, inviting readers to submit alternate interpretations of the scene.
Hilarity ensued. DFC's creator said "A number of people have told me they don't like
The Family Circus because they don't think it applied to them — they never experienced anything remotely like it." One newspaper called the DFC a "twisted Rorschach test." Perhaps this explains why Todd Gaines, the cynical drug dealer from the 1999 film
Go, was compelled to read
Family Circus every day.
For all the abuse it gets, it's clear that
Family Circus speaks to a lot of people. As another newspaper observed at the height of the DFC controversy: no one would bother making a website called
The Dysfunctional Fusco Brothers.
Provides examples of:
- Art Evolution: The dad was originally a lot more buffoonish
◊, but by the 1970s he was a lot trimmer◊ and wore glasses.
- The Barney: Outside its narrow demographic — which probably consists of young children and their grandmas — the comic strip is either hated or Snark Bait.
- Cheerful Child: All the kids.
- Children Are Innocent: One probable reason contemporary readers can't relate to this comic is because it plays this trope straight. Between this and the seeming insistence on G-rated material, this means that fresh humor to be mined from the "kids say/do the darndest things" premise is now extremely limited.
- Elephants Child: All the kids who can talk.
- Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Played straight.
- Gag Dub: The aforementioned Dysfunctional Family Circus, which despite being taken off the web at Keane's request in 1999, survives to this day in various archives.
- Hollywood Scribbling: Billy occasionally fills in for his dad, who is a cartoonist, with the expected results.
- Long Runner: Since the early '60s.
- Malaproper: The kids: i.e. "This is the dawning of the age of asparagus", "A washed pot never boils", etc.
- Memetic Mutation
- Menace Decay: See the trope entry.
- Not Allowed To Grow Up
- Recycled Script: Having been around as long as it has, some panels have been "remade" over the years, most noticably Christmas-related ones; there are also occasional reruns as well.
- Running Gag: Excuse Ghosts. A form of The Ghost, one for every childhood excuse under the sun. The kid says it, a ghost with that name is seen fleeing the scene of the crime. "Not Me" is the best known, but "Ida Know" and "O Yeah" also made appearances.
- Sequential Art: Unlike many other newspaper comics, The Family Circus is not really sequential, at best sometimes using the Dotted Line Path mentioned above.
- Tastes Like Diabetes
- Values Dissonance: A lot of the humour in parodies like Dysfunctional Family Circus comes from the fact that the original Family Circus strips can often be read as promoting traditionalist values to the point of being retrograde. For example, this◊ strip's meaning is (Hopefully) that the two statements are one and the same. But it's easy to read it an Writer On Board defence of young-earth creationism.
- We're Still Relevant, Dammit: The occasional attempts at referencing current events and pop culture. In general the comic's done a good job keeping on top of kiddie trends, using it as background detail most of the time, but elsewhere you get such oddities as Dolly dressing up as Sarah Palin for Halloween 2008 - and that one wasn't even presented as a joke.
- In the mid-'80s when the Chrysler minivans first came out, the family traded their generic station wagon in for one. For the rest of The Eighties, Keane drew it with authentic 1984-86 Plymouth Voyager styling cues; since then it's slowly morphed back into a generic wagon.
