Family Circus by Bil Keane and The Fun Family by Ben Frisch

When Ben Frisch first described his idea for The Fun Family, back before it became a real book published by Top Shelf, it was hard to tell what he thought he was doing. I’ve been reading Family Circus, unwillingly, since I was a kid. The strip began with Bil Keane way back in 1960. Bil Keane died in 2011, but the strip continues, written and drawn by Bil Keane’s son Jeff Keane.  (Jeff, mercifully, has two F’s. Bil Keane’s name is a misspelling waiting to happen.) Actually, Family Circus isn’t technically a strip, any more than The Far Side is, but a single panel that often features the kids, who haven’t aged at all in fifty-six years, still saying cute and unconsciously ironic things to each other.

                It’s one of those strips that I read mostly because it was there in the newspaper, but the cumulative effect of absorbing that panel of corny, odd, sometimes weird humor over the last fifty years has been completely unconscious but probably significant. For some reason I didn’t, at first, want Ben to mess with it. The strip was usually so clean that you could eat off of it, but sometimes not. Family Circus, I have to say, is one of those newspaper funnies that I had to fight my brothers for, not because I wanted to read it, the opposite. When the Sunday paper came with the colored pages of comic strips, we would eventually settle down and share. There were two pages of comics. Sharing meant that whoever snatched the funnies out of the paper first had to decide which page to give up. One page always had the lesser funnies like Mark Trail and Mary Worth and Dondi. The other page had the greater funnies like The Phantom, Li’l Abner, and Dick Tracy. If you got stuck with Mark Trail and Mary Worth, it meant that you’d been too slow or perhaps too weak. Family Circus always seemed to be in there with that second page material some place. It was what you read after you’d read the other strips, if you could help it. Family Circus is a classic, of course because it’s been around so long, but when I was a kid, it was up against Dick Tracy, and, well, I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.

When Ben announced that he was going to do something with it, I was a bit confused. He was fascinated with Family Circus in a way that I had never fathomed possible. He was interested in the subtle subconscious concession that lurked behind the strip. He saw glimpses of thrilling horrors. As he wrote the story, Family Circus shed its skin, and The Fun Family emerged.  The members of the Fun family have all the fun one might associate with institutionalized people on prescription anti-depressant medications. The Funs pursue whatever personal solipsistic desire has lodged in their blank-eyed heads while they disregard responsibility for all of the other members of the family. Each Fun has fun, of course, but isolated, though the habit of familial association lingers with them the way zombies return to the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. Among the Funs, Robby is the holdout, the kid who keeps trying to make matter out of random molecules, the main source of conflict. Robby wants something that involves needing other people. He cares. There’s no happiness in being the only person in the world who is not insane.  

If you’re familiar with Family Circus, you’re probably subconsciously primed for the dissociation of The Fun Family. In Family Circus, Mom (Thel), Dad (Bill), Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and PJ, who hardly ever speaks, are modeled after Bil Keane’s own family.  In The Fun Family, we have Mom (Marsha), Dad (Robert), Robby, Molly, Mikey, and JT. Family Circus is mostly narrated from the kids’ perspectives, especially Billy. The parents are often silent, weary figures in the background. What’s peculiar in the original strip is that the characters seem to be in a state of family, but the story rarely discusses feelings that one might associate with family. Kids seem to be something that must be managed and maintained, but are they to be loved? Do they need to be? The humor in the strip comes from miscommunications or obligations that are childishly misunderstood, by the children, of course, as the long-suffering parents keep watch. The parents don’t speak to each other much either, or if they do, it’s somehow filtered through the kids, whose distorted view of things is never corrected—at least I can’t recall when it was. The distorted view is the punchline.

Those strips were never exactly “touchy, feely” kinds of strips. Nothing seriously bad happens to the kids, of course. The kids are there to be raised and funny things happen along the way. You see what you want to see in Family Circus, I guess. I love Family Circus. It has a kind of nostalgic magic about it. The flatness of the characters is part of the fun. It's certainly not the only comic strip that has relatively flat characters. Consider Dagwood and Blondie, or Sarge and Beetle, or Hi and Lois. Mostly they don’t get very warm and fuzzy with one another either. Consider The Katzenjammer Kids. It’s the longest running strip in history, but when do Hans und Fritz ever get emo? They lack that dimension. It’s kind of scary if you think about it. It can be funny too. Of course, I could say the same thing about a lot of contemporary reality TV.

Obviously, The Fun Family is not Family Circus, nor is it remotely trying to be, but it makes a point of its own. The cartoony art style and the bright Sunday-Funnies color scheme of the book affects the narrative in a nightmarish way. It hurts more to follow unhappy cartoony characters with round heads and Orphan-Annie eyes, than realistically proportioned ones. The Fun Family does something that Family Circus never did, it logically carries the story toward dark narrative conclusions. The characters change. When the mother insists that her children call her Marsha instead of Mom, there’s humor but it causes the jaw to tighten. It’s funny, with a little grim inevitability mixed in. (Do I dare confess that I grew up calling my own parents by their first names? And they had odd first names at that.) Ben brings in grotesque aspects of catch-phrase therapy that are hilarious, but creepily close to truth. How many people mindlessly rely on self-help gurus, inching ever closer to imbibing the kool aid? On another note, I also wonder how many people reading the book will notice the Tennessee Williams reference. But now I’m rambling.

If you haven’t read The Fun Family, then you should. I’m glad Ben didn’t listen to me, when I told him not to do it. (My class discussions are often about whether or not to do something.) Yes, don’t listen to me. Amen.

Mark