Crankshaft: These are Tinkerbelle's antidepressants.

And so even the animals are depressed in the world of Tom Batiuk.

This is not even remotely surprising.

Bizarro: I'll never forget when he was itsy bitsy and got stuck in the water spout.

I'm not an expert on comic books (as opposed to comic strips, on which I am a very much an expert), but I feel like this strip doesn't really work, mostly because it seems like a scene that could actually take place in a Spider-Man comic book, more than in any other superhero's comic book. Isn't this kind of embarrassing situation precisely the sort of thing Peter Parker has to deal with every other issue?

Monty: AAAIEEE! Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren!

This is a good example of how good characters and a sufficiently ridiculous situation can make even the most arcane political humor funny.

Family Circus: Mommy! PJ's crying 'bout something!

No prophet, not even Billy apparently, can resist using fear in an effort to motivate his followers to behave morally/continue to follow him.

Family Circus: How many DOES it take?

Dolly's ambition will not be quelled by simple moral platitudes. And Grandma Keane knows as much. She will now pat Dolly on the head and informed her that she has passed today's test.

Blondie: Is that the inside of our refrigerator.

Here we see Dagwood's version of a live sex show.

He's so excited, he forgot to masturbate.

Ziggy: Oh ... a peeping Tom, eh?

And so, in addition to fish and breakfast cereal, Ziggy also masturbates to bathing birds.

Family Circus: I don't think my brain has any more room left to learn stuff.

Fortunately, Billy has already learned everything there is to learn.

Monty: Haven't you seen that WWII Lockheed C-60 hanging in the basement?

There are two punchlines in this comic: the image-based one in the third panel and the dialog-based one in the fourth. They each come in reaction to the set-up in the second panel, and they are each funny on their own. Putting them together, however, somehow makes them both less funny and results in a worse comic. Turning the first punchline into a cut-away with another panel after it robs it of the power it would have had as a final image, while including the image before the fourth panel makes the second punchline seem like an afterthought.

I get the sense that the cartoonist couldn't decide which punchline was better, so he decided to use both. But that's cheating. Part of working in a medium with severe space limitations is being a ruthless editor. Sometimes you have to cut good stuff so that the stuff you do use is more affecting. Not that there aren't times when cheating can pay off. This just isn't one of those cases.

And just in case anyone's wondering, personally, I would have gone with the first punchline. But I'm a big fan of image-based humor, so I'm a little biased.

Funky Winkerbean: So I've become a blurb whore.

Another very partial list of things you can say in the comics section:

1. "Whore."
2. "Anal."

That future Funky Winkerbean plot just gets more and more disturbing.