Frank and Ernest: I couldn't get health coverage due to a pre-existing condition--I'm broke.

I'm normally against this sort of thing, but I'd actually be all right with Frank and Ernest dying of treatable diseases.

Frank and Ernest: It's funny, Ernie, but you still need to even out the legs.

This comic is hilarious because it's not, in fact, funny.

Frank and Ernest: Go back four seconds.

This cartoon is hilarious because it is quite likely the laziest and most nonsensical cartoon ever published.

Family Circus and Frank and Ernest: Map of Oh-Pun Country

This cartoon is hilarious because it's a complete space-filler that's not even up to the incredibly low standards for which The Family Circus is known.

Given just how low a bar The Family Circus has set, it might come as a surprise to some that it's not actually the worst comic in the comics section. That honor instead goes to Frank and Ernest.

I never write about Frank and Ernest because there's not really a whole lot to say about it. Virtually every installment consists of one lame pun. Sometimes, for a change, the extra large Sunday strip will consist of a string of several lame puns, though that's not the case today. The art, as you can see, is terrible. The characters have no personality traits beyond stupidity--Frank is not distinguishable from Ernest in any meaningful way. It has no continuity. It rarely has a point. As such, it seems to exist merely to fill space. It's an embarrassment.

However bad The Family Circus might be (which is pretty fucking bad), it's not so bad I can't make fun of it. Frank and Ernest is.

Frank and Ernest and Brewster Rockit: Fun--and not so much fun--with puns.

All puns are bad. Take the above installment of the always awful Frank and Ernest, for example.

But some puns are so bad they're good. Stephen Pastis is the master, but Tim Rickard pulls of some pretty decent punnery, too.

The difference between bad puns and so-bad-they're-good puns lies mostly in the set-up. The better the set-up, the funnier the pun. The set-up in that Frank and Ernest is just lazy, and so the pun comes off as lazy, too. The set-up in Brewster Rockit, meanwhile, is so absurd and unexpected that the pun is sort of funny. Likewise, the set-up in the linked Pearls Before Swine is so ornate that the pun is sort of funny. In each case, it's not really the pun that produces the humor, but all the obvious and self-conscious effort the author put into the set-up to make the pun work.

On its own, a pun is a just a pun, after all. And everybody knows puns suck. The trick to making them funny is taking them seriously.