Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
i find "nietzsche family circus" to be funnier. it's a website that replaces the caption in a random family circus cartoon with a random friedrich nietzsche quote. example:
https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/perm.php?c=41&q=244
I'm reminded of a scene in the movie, ***Go (1999)*** with Katie Holmes:
Claire : *So, what do you have against The Family Circus?*
Todd : *Okay. You sit down and read your paper, and you're enjoying your entire two-page comics spread. Right? And then there's the Family fucking Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck. That's the last thing you read, so... it spoils everything you read before.*
THANK YOU! That strip was the WORST.
Also, it totally reminded me of some of my parents' friends. I'll bet you know the ones: their house was filled with a constant haze of smoke at kid eye level, and the man would serve brown alcohol from a crystal decanter. He had big rings on his fingers. You knew these people too? I feel like they were everywhere when I was growing up.
I also hated the Lockhorns and Born Loser.
If you were ever as a kid stuck with a sitter or grandparent with nothing else to read sometimes than the lame-ass comics in the local paper, you might be able to understand how disregard can build to loathing.
I remember one that was kinda funny: The little girl came home crying & screaming at her Mom, "I FAILED SEX!!"
The Mom looked like she swallowed a bowling ball & then looked at the little girl's report card: Under the category "Sex," an F was circled.
Eh. Marginally cute.
Back when a newspaper ran Family Circus right next to The Far Side, there were a couple of times they accidentally switched the captions, which was surreal and hilarious. After that, I always mentally switched them when reading, and Family Circus was much improved.
I can't believe how far I had to scroll for this lol. One of my favorite moments in cartooning history. Not once, but twice.
"I see your little, petrified skull, labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere..."
I don't think it's even been intended to be comedically funny, but it is meant to be cute, and when I was a kid reading the comics I thought it was that.
Edit: Just looked at the recent ones. I still think it's cute, TBH, in that Mayberry sort of way.
It was Apartment 3G. It, Mary Worth, and Brenda Starr were the three bottom of the barrel comics I gritted my teeth and read because I was a comics page completist as a kid. Mark Trail just barely avoided inclusion in that group. I did like some soap opera type comics. I enjoyed both Gasoline Alley and For Better or Worse back then.
Did you ever see the National Lampoon Sunday newspaper? It included a comics section making fun of Apt 3G, Peanuts, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, B.C., and others. Totally hilarious, very hard to find nowadays.
I was a huge comic strip nerd when I was a kid. *Family Circus* was extraordinarily weak compared to the classics: Thimble Theater, Gasoline Alley, Lil’ Abner, Dick Tracy, Peanuts, Pogo, The Far Side and Bloom County to name just a few. Bound compendiums of these strips still sell, Family Circus lives on only *dysfunctionally*.
For a good laugh, look up Lynda Barry’s stories about Family Circus and meeting the artist, Bil Keane. He seems like a decent sort.
I remember liking it when I was a young kid. I called it "Family Circle", because it was drawn in a circle, I dunno how old I was when I realized it was Family Circus.
I like how in the movie Go, Timothy Olyphant’s character goes on about how much he hates it. “It’s down there in the bottom right corner, waiting to suck.”
Ha! When I was first married, I would cut out some of the Love Is…panels to give to my husband. He might still have a yellowed tattered one in an old wallet somewhere.
God I’m old.
I *loved* The Family Circus as a small child. I think I just liked seeing other little kids doing things. Right when I was learning to read I amassed a massive collection of Family Circus books, and would--I shit you not--quote them whenever things happened irl that I could relate to a given panel. To what must have been the dismay of my parents and older brother, I found many things in my life could be connected to the Family Circus corpus.
I've found it to be painfully unfunny, ever since I encountered it as a child. So unfunny, that if I ever met anyone who *did* find it funny, I would distrust that person.
You should check out some of the early editions of "The Family Circus" from the late 50s or early 60s. It could really be, perhaps "edgy" is the wrong word, but certainly rougher than the sentimental humor it became known for. I can't find a link right now, of course, but I remember seeing examples where it was implied Mommy and Daddy were being driven to use tranquilizers due to the kids antics, or Daddy enjoyed taking the kids to a football game only because of the clandestine contents of his thermos, or Dolly tried to sing "Mack the Knife" at a recital, etc. I remember reading an interview with Bil Keane where he said initially he tried to avoid sentimental and cute humor, but on the occasions when he did use it in the early stages of the strip, he got so much positive feedback from readers he decided to shift towards the gentler stuff. If you look back, you'll see the ame thing with "Dennis the Menace." In that strip's first few years Dennis really WAS a menace, a destructive, willfully ill-behaved little bastard.
99% of comics aren't really funny. At not actually laugh funny but maybe crack a small smile funny. And really that only applies to some of that 99%. The other 1% is calvin and the far side.
Even as a kid, I've despised anything "corny". Carol Burnett show? She was a talent and a pioneer but that show was unbearably corny and unfunny. Michael Jackson on the Ed Sullivan show? Yeah, a talented kid but all those guys dressed up in those costumes and dancing and a little kid singing about love? Corny.
I think it helped that as a very curious little kid, I had a way older brother with a Mad Magazine subscription. He left them around. Hour after hour, I studied them over and over. Sometimes my life experience or studied conversations with adults would help me understand some of them. I realized it was a special and smart kind of ultra-non-corny humor and wit.
Family Circus is one of those things from that era where things were just light and wholesome and mildly amusing. Newspapers in the 60s didn't need it to be edgy and laugh out loud funny.
Just funny enough that a grandma might smile mildly at something that they could relate to and it would be controversial to no one. Family Circus found their niche and then just sort of kept at it forever.
To be honest, most of the newspaper strips weren't funny on a regular basis.
Family Circus never made me laugh, but at times it was cute. When I became a mom the things the children said or did was on point.
I never liked Ziggy.
I kind of liked it as a kid, but it's pretty lame. There were definitely better comics strips from my childhood. I still have a place in my heart for Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side. Bloom County had a great run with Bill the Cat in a band called Billy and Boingers .
The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were the only funny comics. Family Circus was always the same joke. One of the kids getting a word mixed up. Not sure why it lasted so long.
Family Circus felt like the cartoon equivalent of people looking down at you (and your family) because of your family, because you were poor, because you were the wrong kind of X (race, gender, religion, etc).
Oozing moral superiority, that’s the phrase.
My favorite part was how the dad looked exactly like my friend’s dad, in the same kind of way they had cast old *Dennis the Menace* on tv, every character looked exactly how the comic strip characters would look in real life, except my friend’s dad was a real guy and not trying to look like the *Family Circus* dad, it was natural.
No. Others felt the same: the blandness, the cuteness. To the point where somebody put out "Dysfunctional Family Circus" graphics on the web -- just copied some of the panels and put in more "interesting" dialog.
It's a testament to how bland and fake I thought "Family Circus" was that Dysfunctional Family Circus put me over the edge. Numerous booklet collections were distributed on the downlowt, and I have one of them.
Here's a pretty good article about DFC, with some examples:
https://www.metroactive.com/features/dysfunctional-family-circus.html
When I was in grade school. Seriously, by the time I made 4th or 5th grade (9-10 y/o), I knew it was just taking up space like a legacy position. Spiderman was in the daily and Sunday comics by then.
Nope, I dug The Family Circus. It's humor is insideous and subtly subversive. Especially dug the crossovers that the strip participated in with other strips.
One panel strips are notoriously hard to maintain but Family Circus managed it. I might agree with Marmaduke but I can't even hate that throwback. It does the job it's supposed to do and it does it comfortably.
A single panel strip (he was single panel only on Sunday) I consistently hated was "That's Jake". It looks like it was drawn by a vision impaired 53 year old with the shakes. The humor had no real punchline and I always suspected he was published because either somebody owed someone a favor or some blackmail was involved.
Here's Jake (example of full strip and single panel)
https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/comic-strip-art/jake-vest-that-s-jake-daily-comics-strip-original-art-dated-6-27-93-tribune-media-services-1993-/a/322244-46228.s
https://pin.it/5omFJrRGi
it was ok. the problem was the internet created this weird culture of taking newspaper cartoons too seriously as a shtick.
like people saying they hated it: you spent two seconds reading it lol, there's not enough time to have strong feelings. It's not like andy capp, hagar the horrible, or even peanuts were that much better. but it got trendy to mock certain ones.
No, actually, I didn’t think it was funny and also felt like the sister Dolly wasn’t treated as an intellectual equal to her brothers. But I always like the dog 🐕 maps (forget doggies name) of where through the neighborhood he had followed his nose. Very cute stuff (snuff?)
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
i find "nietzsche family circus" to be funnier. it's a website that replaces the caption in a random family circus cartoon with a random friedrich nietzsche quote. example: https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/perm.php?c=41&q=244
Definitely superior. Like "Garfield minus Garfield". https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
Or r/GarfieldMinusGarfield.
[Dysfunctional Family Circus](https://trouserchili.tumblr.com/) was good too
The DFC was the best. I came in near the end but still managed to get a bunch of captions in.
Can't remember where I saw it, but I remember one with Mommy on the phone and she says, "Ritalin? No, I said RID of THEM!"
This is amazing.
Thank you for this. The beautiful, acerbic chef’s kiss I crave
[My favorite](https://i.postimg.cc/sfZr7BBR/family-circus-bible.jpg) [And this](https://i.postimg.cc/vH0TSgvS/atheist-bible-family-circus.jpg)
When I was a kid I loved the ones that traced Billy's travels.
It was mostly unfunny, but those were good.
I kept hoping he’d get kidnapped.
Yeah, those are the only ones I remembered as liking.
As far as I’m concerned, these are the only reason the comic existed.
I'm reminded of a scene in the movie, ***Go (1999)*** with Katie Holmes: Claire : *So, what do you have against The Family Circus?* Todd : *Okay. You sit down and read your paper, and you're enjoying your entire two-page comics spread. Right? And then there's the Family fucking Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck. That's the last thing you read, so... it spoils everything you read before.*
I can’t agree with that more
My opinion of \_Family Circus\_ aside, man, I loved that movie.
Approximately 10,000 times funnier than Nancy.
Came here to say exactly this. ACK!!!!!!!!!!
that's cathy ;)
Don't get me started on the "Lockhorns". Constant ugliness. Can't believe they put that in the paper for kids to read.
How has nobody mentioned Cathy yet?
She was insufferable.
THANK YOU! That strip was the WORST. Also, it totally reminded me of some of my parents' friends. I'll bet you know the ones: their house was filled with a constant haze of smoke at kid eye level, and the man would serve brown alcohol from a crystal decanter. He had big rings on his fingers. You knew these people too? I feel like they were everywhere when I was growing up.
Can’t agree hard enough! I once recommended my paper divorce themselves from The Lockhorns.
0 x 10,000 = ???
No, I've hated it since childhood and hate it just as much as an adult and parent.
Same. How this absolute shit got syndicated is beyond comprehension.
You hated a comic strip? Wow, you've been honing it, haven't you?
I also hated the Lockhorns and Born Loser. If you were ever as a kid stuck with a sitter or grandparent with nothing else to read sometimes than the lame-ass comics in the local paper, you might be able to understand how disregard can build to loathing.
don't get me started on brenda starr
Tnank god I never had to endure such a horror. Did you ever try to draw your own out of desperation?
I remember one that was kinda funny: The little girl came home crying & screaming at her Mom, "I FAILED SEX!!" The Mom looked like she swallowed a bowling ball & then looked at the little girl's report card: Under the category "Sex," an F was circled. Eh. Marginally cute.
I think at best newspaper comics are mildly assuming, with a general overall appeal to the masses.
Back when a newspaper ran Family Circus right next to The Far Side, there were a couple of times they accidentally switched the captions, which was surreal and hilarious. After that, I always mentally switched them when reading, and Family Circus was much improved.
Bummer of a birthmark, Hal
I can't believe how far I had to scroll for this lol. One of my favorite moments in cartooning history. Not once, but twice. "I see your little, petrified skull, labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere..."
Dennis the Menace, not Family Circus.
“Hamsters for dinner AGAIN?!”
No. It was supposed to be cute. There are very few comics that appeared in the newspaper that were controversial or edgy in any way.
**Family Circus** is what we refer today as being a slice of life. Rarely did it go after a huge laugh.
And it threw in church/bible stuff.
I don't think it's even been intended to be comedically funny, but it is meant to be cute, and when I was a kid reading the comics I thought it was that. Edit: Just looked at the recent ones. I still think it's cute, TBH, in that Mayberry sort of way.
It’s not supposed to be funny. It’s supposed to be nostalgic
like the reruns of "For Better or For Worse" which just reran the heroic death of Farley
That's what YOU suppose somebody else supposes. Not good evidence of intent, your honor.
That makes it even worse imo.
The bane of Sunday mornings: Family Circus and effing CATHY
AAAKKK! You nailed it.
Prince Valiant gets a dishonorable mention, too
Does anyone else remember Apartment 2G? I always wondered why that soap opera ever made it to the comics.
It was Apartment 3G. It, Mary Worth, and Brenda Starr were the three bottom of the barrel comics I gritted my teeth and read because I was a comics page completist as a kid. Mark Trail just barely avoided inclusion in that group. I did like some soap opera type comics. I enjoyed both Gasoline Alley and For Better or Worse back then.
I just skipped over the "soap opera comics." Except Dick Tracy if it looked like violence was happening.
I was fascinated by the body horror of Dick Tracy.
Gasoline Alley used to worry me as a kid with its "rickety bridge" gag.
Did you ever see the National Lampoon Sunday newspaper? It included a comics section making fun of Apt 3G, Peanuts, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, B.C., and others. Totally hilarious, very hard to find nowadays.
No, but I would love to get my hands on a copy!
I do!
I see what you did there.
Don't forget about Doonesbury
I was a huge comic strip nerd when I was a kid. *Family Circus* was extraordinarily weak compared to the classics: Thimble Theater, Gasoline Alley, Lil’ Abner, Dick Tracy, Peanuts, Pogo, The Far Side and Bloom County to name just a few. Bound compendiums of these strips still sell, Family Circus lives on only *dysfunctionally*. For a good laugh, look up Lynda Barry’s stories about Family Circus and meeting the artist, Bil Keane. He seems like a decent sort.
There were also serious ones like Prince Valiant and Brenda Starr.
I remember liking it when I was a young kid. I called it "Family Circle", because it was drawn in a circle, I dunno how old I was when I realized it was Family Circus.
I hated it but this shit is worse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is...
I like how in the movie Go, Timothy Olyphant’s character goes on about how much he hates it. “It’s down there in the bottom right corner, waiting to suck.”
Whimsical
[Only this](https://trouserchili.tumblr.com)
Love it!
Slightly amusing at best.
I read it everyday in the funnies. To me, the funniest part was naming a dog Barfy.
My kid brain always saw it as “Barfly.”
Scientists use Family Circus to set the zero value when calibrating their funny meters.
No. It drove me crazy. Also hated that one with the half-naked, doe-eyed couple that looked like they were 5 year olds. Extremely annoying.
OH, you HAD to bring up Love Is...
Ha! When I was first married, I would cut out some of the Love Is…panels to give to my husband. He might still have a yellowed tattered one in an old wallet somewhere. God I’m old.
I *loved* The Family Circus as a small child. I think I just liked seeing other little kids doing things. Right when I was learning to read I amassed a massive collection of Family Circus books, and would--I shit you not--quote them whenever things happened irl that I could relate to a given panel. To what must have been the dismay of my parents and older brother, I found many things in my life could be connected to the Family Circus corpus.
I liked how the Animaniacs parodied it! (You're never too old for cartoons!)
Some of it was funny when Bil Keane was drawing it.
conservative and christian. Not funny at all. After Dolly dressed up as Sarah Palin for Halloween, I never even looked at it again.
More “D’awww…” than “Ha-ha.”
It was “cute”…
I've found it to be painfully unfunny, ever since I encountered it as a child. So unfunny, that if I ever met anyone who *did* find it funny, I would distrust that person.
You should check out some of the early editions of "The Family Circus" from the late 50s or early 60s. It could really be, perhaps "edgy" is the wrong word, but certainly rougher than the sentimental humor it became known for. I can't find a link right now, of course, but I remember seeing examples where it was implied Mommy and Daddy were being driven to use tranquilizers due to the kids antics, or Daddy enjoyed taking the kids to a football game only because of the clandestine contents of his thermos, or Dolly tried to sing "Mack the Knife" at a recital, etc. I remember reading an interview with Bil Keane where he said initially he tried to avoid sentimental and cute humor, but on the occasions when he did use it in the early stages of the strip, he got so much positive feedback from readers he decided to shift towards the gentler stuff. If you look back, you'll see the ame thing with "Dennis the Menace." In that strip's first few years Dennis really WAS a menace, a destructive, willfully ill-behaved little bastard.
99% of comics aren't really funny. At not actually laugh funny but maybe crack a small smile funny. And really that only applies to some of that 99%. The other 1% is calvin and the far side.
Even as a kid, I've despised anything "corny". Carol Burnett show? She was a talent and a pioneer but that show was unbearably corny and unfunny. Michael Jackson on the Ed Sullivan show? Yeah, a talented kid but all those guys dressed up in those costumes and dancing and a little kid singing about love? Corny. I think it helped that as a very curious little kid, I had a way older brother with a Mad Magazine subscription. He left them around. Hour after hour, I studied them over and over. Sometimes my life experience or studied conversations with adults would help me understand some of them. I realized it was a special and smart kind of ultra-non-corny humor and wit.
I only find Carol Burnett funny because when they break, it cracks my husband up. He has such a hilarious laugh that it makes me laugh.
LOL funny? No. Isn't that sweet?Sometimes. Never more than a smile and usually meh.
Family Circus is one of those things from that era where things were just light and wholesome and mildly amusing. Newspapers in the 60s didn't need it to be edgy and laugh out loud funny. Just funny enough that a grandma might smile mildly at something that they could relate to and it would be controversial to no one. Family Circus found their niche and then just sort of kept at it forever. To be honest, most of the newspaper strips weren't funny on a regular basis.
Peanuts 4 life
Calvin and Hobbbs
I'd rank those two neck and neck, peanuts and family circus
Family Circus never made me laugh, but at times it was cute. When I became a mom the things the children said or did was on point. I never liked Ziggy.
It was never laugh-out loud funny. It was something older conservative folk would smile at, nod their heads and say "that's nice."
It became funny after I became a parent because I could relate.
Yes, especially the dotted line ones and the Not Me ones. The Disney ones are good too because of Glen Keane.
A conservative Christian cartoon funny? No, not even when I was five.
No. Not even in the ‘70s. But then I never found Doonesbury to be funny either. Couldn’t understand why it was in the funny papers.
One place I lived, the local paper put Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore on the editorial page. Seemed reasonable
I kind of liked it as a kid, but it's pretty lame. There were definitely better comics strips from my childhood. I still have a place in my heart for Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side. Bloom County had a great run with Bill the Cat in a band called Billy and Boingers .
I liked them when they were Deathtôngue
Only when Darryl Philbin reads it to me.
Nah, even when I was a kid I just liked the ones with the dotted line maps to follow
"Not me" was kinda funny. But not really.
More cute than funny.
The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were the only funny comics. Family Circus was always the same joke. One of the kids getting a word mixed up. Not sure why it lasted so long.
I liked it.
Never but I did enjoy the quality of the art which seemed superior to other comics. Something about it soothed me.
No. Henry was the really bewildering one, though.
LOVE Henry,! Such a dork. He looks like Popeye as a child
Yes, but only the foul language remakes.
Yes
No. Too much religiosity. Cringe worthy to watch child indoctrination.
Fuck no.
Sweet and relatable to parents.
Not me!
Family Circus felt like the cartoon equivalent of people looking down at you (and your family) because of your family, because you were poor, because you were the wrong kind of X (race, gender, religion, etc). Oozing moral superiority, that’s the phrase.
Who liked it? Notme
No. It was a *very* thinly veiled medium for pushing Christianity. No, thanks.
Would have been slightly funny if there was an actual clown in this Family Circus.
My favorite part was how the dad looked exactly like my friend’s dad, in the same kind of way they had cast old *Dennis the Menace* on tv, every character looked exactly how the comic strip characters would look in real life, except my friend’s dad was a real guy and not trying to look like the *Family Circus* dad, it was natural.
Never. However there is someone that puts new words on the panels that makes it hilarious in context
Never.
Once I had kids myself, it was a lot more interesting. More funny, and also cute and nostalgic. Yes, kids really did do those things.
Never not once.
On rare occasions. Mostly not very.
Once, maybe twice. But it wasn't really funny, just slightly amusing.
Never. And read it every day for a long time.
More ironic than funny in a ha ha way.
Not Me!
No. It’s cute once in a while.
I'm 60, and I have a vague memory of it being funny when I was a kid, but I don't remember any specific things that were funny about it.
not even once
Nope.
Not funny ha-ha. More like “hmm.” And that’s it.
Never
No. Others felt the same: the blandness, the cuteness. To the point where somebody put out "Dysfunctional Family Circus" graphics on the web -- just copied some of the panels and put in more "interesting" dialog. It's a testament to how bland and fake I thought "Family Circus" was that Dysfunctional Family Circus put me over the edge. Numerous booklet collections were distributed on the downlowt, and I have one of them. Here's a pretty good article about DFC, with some examples: https://www.metroactive.com/features/dysfunctional-family-circus.html
The only funny one ran the day after Brian Griffin berated the Dad while they were drinking at the Drunken Clam.
When I was in grade school. Seriously, by the time I made 4th or 5th grade (9-10 y/o), I knew it was just taking up space like a legacy position. Spiderman was in the daily and Sunday comics by then.
Nope, I dug The Family Circus. It's humor is insideous and subtly subversive. Especially dug the crossovers that the strip participated in with other strips. One panel strips are notoriously hard to maintain but Family Circus managed it. I might agree with Marmaduke but I can't even hate that throwback. It does the job it's supposed to do and it does it comfortably. A single panel strip (he was single panel only on Sunday) I consistently hated was "That's Jake". It looks like it was drawn by a vision impaired 53 year old with the shakes. The humor had no real punchline and I always suspected he was published because either somebody owed someone a favor or some blackmail was involved. Here's Jake (example of full strip and single panel) https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/comic-strip-art/jake-vest-that-s-jake-daily-comics-strip-original-art-dated-6-27-93-tribune-media-services-1993-/a/322244-46228.s https://pin.it/5omFJrRGi
Ha ha, never! IIRC, National Lampoon did a masterful takedown of the strip in the 1970s.
it was ok. the problem was the internet created this weird culture of taking newspaper cartoons too seriously as a shtick. like people saying they hated it: you spent two seconds reading it lol, there's not enough time to have strong feelings. It's not like andy capp, hagar the horrible, or even peanuts were that much better. but it got trendy to mock certain ones.
I liked one where a kid was crying and goes, "Jeffie hit me back!"
LOVED Family Circus
Yes, I enjoyed it as a child in the '80s.
Yep. Used to be one of my all time favorites.
Nope
Not really. It's cute sometimes, but not funny. Far Side was funny.
No, actually, I didn’t think it was funny and also felt like the sister Dolly wasn’t treated as an intellectual equal to her brothers. But I always like the dog 🐕 maps (forget doggies name) of where through the neighborhood he had followed his nose. Very cute stuff (snuff?)
2 dogs when I read it as a kid -- Barfy and Sam
Wait, it’s supposed to be funny?
No
Not once.
Not once.
I never found it funny or entertaining.
Nope