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The Family Circus: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|'''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:''' ''[[Bile Fascination|I hate it, but I'm compelled to read it.]]''
|Dialogue from the movie ''Go''}}
In its literal form, Bil Keane's '''''[
Other characters include random neighbor children, pets, extended family members [[Spirit Advisor|(many of whom are dead)]], and various [[The Ghost|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.
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Besides little kids, the sincere fanbase for the comic consists of 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, began assisting his dad with the comic in the 2000s, and has taken over following Bil's death in November 2011.
While it's ostensibly a humorous comic strip with a wide circulation, ''The Family Circus'' has been more popular as the butt of jokes at least since [[The Nineties]]. Amazon.com's user-contributed book reviews are infamous for containing snarky reviews of the printed collections of panels. Such reviews usually fawn over the tremendous symbolism and deep philosophical meaning in its plain single-panel storylines, often discovering hidden [[Freud Was Right|Freudian]] or [[Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory|religious]] symbolism. [[The Comics Curmudgeon]] blog takes particular delight in mocking the strip and its characters. In the ''[[Diary of a Wimpy Kid]]'' novels, which are aimed at preteens, it's parodied as ''Li'l Cutie''. There was also an episode of ''[[Pinky and The Brain]]'' where Brain's scheme is foiled by Bill Keane out of retribution towards Pinky for simply saying publicly that he found the comic unfunny.
The early days of the Web (1995-99) saw a [[Web Original]] feature called ''Dysfunctional Family Circus''. Family Circus strips were posted without the original caption, inviting readers to submit alternate interpretations of the scene. [[Hilarity Ensues|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 (film)|Go]]'', was compelled to read ''Family Circus'' every day.
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For all the abuse it gets, it's clear that ''The 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 Web site called ''The Dysfunctional Fusco Brothers''.
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{{tropelist}}
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* [[Implausible Deniability]]: Thel finds PJ hiding in a closet devouring a bag of stolen cookies. PJ cries, "I not here! I with Daddy!"
* [[Innocent Swearing]]: Jeffy does this, and gets spanked for it.
* [[Long Runner]]:
* [[Malaproper]]: The kids: e.g, "This is the dawning of the age of asparagus", "A washed pot never boils", etc.
* [[Menace Decay]]: Back in [[The Sixties]], the kids were the typical comic portrayal of overexcited tots; since their behavior hasn't kept in step with the times, it's hard to see this family as a metaphorical wacky circus.
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[[Category:Print Long Runners]]
[[Category:The Family Circus]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Family Circus, The}}
[[Category:Newspaper Comics of the 1960s]]
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[[Category:Newspaper Comics of the 2000s]]
[[Category:Newspaper Comics of the 2010s]]
[[Category:Newspaper Comics of the 2020s]]
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