The Family Circus/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Subjective Tropes for The Family Circus go here. If you spot any more showing up on the Main page, place them here, but remember to organize them in the north, south, east, and west to maximize your Chi!


Subjectively, The Family Circus provides examples of:

  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The producer's name on the Easter special is named Edward F. Cullen.
  • Snark Bait
  • Tastes Like Diabetes
  • Tear Jerker: Even the online comics snark community found the tribute to Thel Keane (who recently passed away) to be rather touching.
  • Values Dissonance: A lot of the humour in parodies like Dysfunctional Family Circus comes from the fact that the original 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.
  • 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.
    • That same Halloween Billy was dressed as Iron Man, but for some reason colored as if he was Spider-Man.
    • 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.