Wow, those are a bit horrendous. How could anyone perceive getting geese mixed up with cars as funny? I thought the likes of Baby Crockett and Ginger from DC Thompson’s Beezer were bad, but gosh….

Aww I think those are actually kind of adorable :)

It’s like my grandpa doing his best to tell a joke.

When I first read the strip’s name, I swore it said Unfunny Bunny. I think they knew what they were getting into when they named the strip…

hI not related to the post but I found PRESTO online at smelly cat:
http://smellycat.com.br/2008/07/04/presto-assista-o-novo-curta-da-pixar-na-integra/

It’s no worse than that Betty Boop strip from a couple of days ago.

I….like it.
I wouldn’t want to read it every week but….
then again, I like Bucky and Pepito.
Frankly, I’m more impressed that you have Weekly Readers in your archives!

Because many of us (me included) have a habit of worshipping work of days gone by and lament what has been lost, it’s kind of reassuring to know that every age had its soulless cack.

Almost makes you wanna see Percy & Gandy in there!

Oh Jerry! Those are bad. Very bad.

But not as bad as these! xD

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m32/JulianCarter/comics.jpg

These strips appeared regularly in Maltese publications (like magazines). I put English translations under each strip.

Funny Bunny’s reaction expressions in the final panels are priceless, they help me understand that something the monkey said is stupid or funny. Thanks for sharing Jerry!

And here I thought that Bazooka Joe had the market cornered for lame comic strips.

It’s awfulness is awe inspiring.

Loki? As in the Norse god? Oi vey….

I think the Thanksgiving strip freaked me out the most -___-’ Thank you for sharing, makes me want to pull out my own weekly readers to show everyone how unfunny they still were in the early 90’s when I had to read them…

The typeface-style lettering is the icing on the cake. “Loki Your Fuzzy Forest Friend” is marginally more bearable, however.

These are instructive to look at, ‘cos many of the gags aren’t any worse than what you’ve seen many times; it’s the limp and lifeless cartooning that really kills these things. Makes you realize how much of a marriage of gag and art a successful cartoon’s gotta be.

I’ll at least give the strip’s creators a half a point for the Jack Benny impersonation that Uncle Funny does in the last strip of the first batch!

Today’s post brings up a good question… What current comic strips should be retired from circulation? (assuming you still read a “traditional” newspaper)

Our paper held a vote of this sort last year. While I campaigned mercilessly for the removal of “Snuffy Smif”… I could not counter the strong tide of elderly voters who wanted to keep all the “classics” in place.

The jokes are actually so bad that they become even funnier than they were originally meant to be.

This seems like a good time to start that Jack Pierce fan club that I’ve been thinking about. :)

It’s nice to see that the DreamWorks animated features are rooted in a long-running tradition of comedic awfulness.

I like how the rabbit is always out buying groceries. Notice too he’s *walking* home with them..very green.

“These are instructive to look at, ‘cos many of the gags aren’t any worse than what you’ve seen many times; it’s the limp and lifeless cartooning that really kills these things. Makes you realize how much of a marriage of gag and art a successful cartoon’s gotta be.”

That’s exactly my opinion too.

Those really are sad. Even kids wouldn’t enjoy those.

I bet Ned Flanders loves it. Kinda reminds me of Bazooka Joe gum wrapper strips or Highlights magazine.

Jerry, have you ever SEEN a Garfield comic? At least this guy tries to draw things a little differently each time. I mean, maybe he isn’t capable of the soul crushingly bland, human-comic-factory style that dominates modern American funny pages, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t more visually pleasant.

I’m assuming this isn’t the same Jack Pierce who created the brilliant monster make-up for the old Universal horror films.

I rather like the idea of an extensive banner being pulled from the ‘business end’ of a turkey at Thanksgiving Dinner. I think I’ll try and pull that this year.

Uncle Funny Bunny’s facial reactions take the cake, though. Jack Price is a comic genius.

Thanks for making my morning!

They’re not bad, but they’re not good either. I can only hope people find my comics better than those.

Sadly, lots of syndicated newspaper strips featuring big-name cartoon or comic book stars degenerated into gag-a-days not much different from this—not much funnier, nor (in some cases) much better drawn. In every case, a formerly funny or adventurous character devolved over time into a generic suburbanite telling interchangeably stale joke-book jokes.
Were it not for their connections to big studios or brands, these strips would in virtually all cases have died decades earlier. Pity they didn’t; I think their perseverance in weakened form actually hurt the brands with which they were connected—in some cases severely.
You have to wonder why a major corporation would link itself publicly with frankly unprofessional art and indistinguishable “humor” in a forum as public and grown-up as a major newspaper. Not to say, of course, that children or smaller audiences deserve rubbish.

Something about this comic makes me think a lot about Internet sensation “Boston and Shaun” (www.bostonandshaun.com), which has had many articles written and even a couple of Flash animations made about its bizarre sensibilities.

I like the way the sample comic is presented sans punchline panel at the head of this post. At first, I thought that *was* the whole strip and that I was in for some sort of surreal masterpiece… :)

blah… blah… blah… blah…

It’s kind of…GOODbad. There is entertainment value in discovering for yourself just how bad it is. And placing animal heads on human bodies has ALWAYS been a winning combination.

Wow. Reminds me of the boondocks strip, only better drawn.

Fluffy, get in my pouch!

Eew, I remember “Weekly Reader”. They used to make us read that when I was in kindergarten. I don’t remember a comic strip like this though. I can see why Uncle Funny Bunny never made it to the grown-up newspaper!

It’s unintentionally funny, but the title character is literally a monkey’s uncle!

Have you ever read Mallard Fillmore? This is genius next to Mallard Fillmore.

You have to wonder why a major corporation would link itself publicly with frankly unprofessional art

Disney and WB have done this forever. Have you seen most animation publicity art? It’s bloody awful!

As for the topic at hand - there are certainly no shortage of appallingly-drawn comic strips syndicated today, which seems to indicate that syndicates really don’t care about good art as long as the ‘humour’ is as bland and inoffensive(or ripping off Far Side/Calvin & Hobbes) as possible. These strips though are painful in a good way. BAD art is easy to get angry about but this shows how BLAND art can also be a kiss of death to a comic that might otherwise just be okay.

i can sum it up in one word:

AWE-FUL!

It’s awful, all right, but “Bears in Love” was worse.

http://www.platypuscomix.net/otherpeople/worstcomixever/bearsinlove.html

I don’t want to think about the state of comic strips today, it’s too depressing to someone who actually still wants in. My local newspaper is treading water in this economy and minaturized the Sunday funnies from eight pages to six while keeping almost every strip. It looks as awful and uncaring as you can picture it. And the worst part of it is, why SHOULD they care??

What you CAN do is start reading Lio; there are still good syndicate strips in this universe.
http://www.gocomics.com/lio/

Lio is awesome. Trust me, you WANT to click there.

“I thought the likes of Baby Crockett and Ginger from DC Thompson’s Beezer were bad, but gosh….”

There was nothing wrong with the visuals in the strips you mention, Ryan. Bill Ritchie and Dudley Watkins were fantastic cartoonists.

Now I see where THE BRADY BUNCH got their jokes from…jeez. A bunny that ain’t funny and a chimp called Chump’…..comedy GOLD. Thanx for postin’ it, Jer! Compared to this pantload, MY jokes seem funny!

the one i used to hate growing up was in the Highlights for Children magazine, it was the Timbertoes- that and Goofus and Gallant.

All these are good photoshop material

Haha these are great! If someone published a collection of ‘Uncle Funny Bunny and Chumpy’ I would definitely pick it up.

It’s at least as funny as “Beetle Baily” and “Hagar the Horrible” are lately, and slightly funnier than “Luann”.

*Disney and WB have done this forever. Have you seen most animation publicity art? It’s bloody awful!*

I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve often wondered why the art on the Disney DVDs is so clumsy-looking and trite. The Lion King DVD has characters on it that look like they’re made of Play-Doh (horrible shading and coloring) and just about all the characters on the cover of the Lady and the Tramp DVD are off model, except for Lady. All the DVD Disney art is so terrible that I’m convinced it’s done by the same “artist”. But who? WHO???

Anyone remember the WEEKLY READER parody in National Lampoon, done in the style of WEEKLY WORLD NEWS for grade school kids? It was published thirty-five years or so ago, so I’m sure everyone’s seen it. On its back page was a comic called UNCLE FUNNY MONEY, probably drawn by Warren Sattler or Alan Kupperberg. The rabbit was a pimp, and his sidekick was a hippo ho.

Uncle Funny Money: You gots my money?
Hippo: Yassuh! I gots seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents!
Uncle Funny Money: Wha? Which one gave you de twenty-five cents?
Hippo: All of dem!!!!
(Uncle Funny Money does a gag take)

Highlights for Children WAS equally awful, Gene Hole. And Goofus and Gallant were so begging to be animated by the p.c. zealots, but that never happened.

As bad as these are (and they are horrible), they have yet to compare to the complete garbage of webcomics like CTRL-ALT-DEL or Dresden Codak.

The characters look kind of nice to me, and I like that they aren’t trying too hard to be witty or clever. Not trying at all! But then again, Funny Uncle Bunny (or whoever) kind of overacts on the punchlines, no?

It’s OK Mr. Bunny, he just said he was going to make the chairs more uncomfortable! He’s not going to saw you up and cook your parts for dinner. Because that wouldn’t be funny at all. It would just be hurtful.

I get the impression that the cartoonist knew he wasn’t adept at drawing funny animals; that fox who appears in a few of these strips looks as if it was “inspired” by the fox from Walt Kelly’s POGO. (I’d write “swiped”, but the drawing is too inept to be referred to as a swipe!)

I find the use of color in these strips especially weird. There are color bow ties, pants and title lettering, but with no particular rhyme or reason, as though adding the color touches was an afterthought by the printer. In one of the strips, a character is wearing red gloves; when I first saw it, I thought he had bloody paws!

Y’know, the copyright holders of UNCLE FUNNY BUNNY should syndicate these old strips to any of the free alternative papers that proliferate in bigger cities. I’m sure that their sheer awfulness would be interpreted as post-modern irony by the hip crowd!

The one element that’s missing from these is the old chestnut of havin one character doing a reaction “take” by falling backwards out of the panel, with only some motion line, a small dust cloud or two and the character’s arched feet showing. If you’ve ever been exposed to the modern CONDORITO comic strip (seen in many Hispanic newspapers), you’ll have your fill of this gimmick within a week or two. It seems to happen in at least one out of ever three CONDORITO dailies!

(By the way, there have been many American cartoonists — including myself — who have been approached, over the years, to “Americanize” CONDORITO and somehow make it funny to our tastes…an impossible task, I assure you!)

http://www.condorito.cl/ingles/index.htm

At least UNCLE FUNNY BUNNY is a bit closer to that “so bad it’s good” territory.

“Bears in Love:” What can you say about a “cute” strip that’s so dialogue-heavy, the characters are always sitting or bending over to make more room for the word balloons?

CONDORITO looks like a shell-less turtle. Is that the joke?

Imho, the majority of webcomics nowadays are worse than this. This one is unfunny and not very well drawn, but atleast it doesn’t make me want to puke my brains out.

Well it’s 1952 for the K to 7 crowd. It’d be a worse story if it were a daily syndicated strip. It does exemplify when strips lose their relevancy; the situations are not unique to the characters and the characters are just puppets used to tell jokes. I’m imagining by different writers yet the simialr drawing styles of funny bunny and Loki that the writer was probably staff as was the artist, maybe from the paste up department :)).
I’ve heard it said that a bad children’s book is a book that only children like. I guess the same holds true for any medium, even strips.

When i was a kid I loved a weekly strip called Doug Wright’s Family. It wasn’t for kiddies but I wonder how that’d hold up for me nowadays.

Loki isn’t that bad compared to most comics in syndication today. In fact, it would fit right in.

Somehow I find the fact that Uncle Funny Bunny has human hands incredibly disturbing.

This strip makes the emotrip Funky Winkerbean look sunny.

Oh, man. These absolutely cry out for new dialogue, maybe something out of a surreal random quotes generator, or perhaps a Project Marmaduke treatment. I want more!

I remember Weekly Readers from the distant past of the mid 1990s, and I know they had crap comics like that on the back page, only they were usually about drugs and not eating razor-filled candy at Haloween.

Even when I was little, reading them gave me ulcers. I used to draw angry faces on the mild-looking forest creatures on the cover. But maybe that says something about me. :P

Bill Griffith occasionally parodies strips like this (well, not exactly like this) in his “Zippy the Pinhead” series. Sometimes he’ll write the dialogue in Polish, Hungarian or some other Eastern European language (why, I’m not sure).

This is grade-A, 100% pure dreck… it makes Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” seem utterly hilarious by comparison!

How does a chimpanzee come to have a rabbit for an uncle, anyway? If it is the result of a “mixed” marriage (mixed species, that is), then that strip is actually years ahead of its time!

My 9 year old daughter would love these. Really.

This brings back memories! I remember the strip as Uncle Funny Bunny, and by the late sixties Chumpy had been replaced by a rabbit nephew. Still the same style jokes though. Don’t ask why I remember the strip- because I don’t know of anybody in our class who thought they were funny. The Loki strip is something my grandmother might have liked, though, particularly the one where he helps the little bird.
For bad comics in a “real” newspaper, I would go with Scamp- another funny animal joke a day strip-just better drawn than UFB. I never knew why Scamp ran as long as it did.
I’m surprised the Onion hasn’t gotten the rights to run the Uncle Funny Bunny and Chimpy archives.

jeezus people, these strips aren’t aimed at you. I can tell you from experience this is exactly the kind of stuff that kids about 3 to 7 find hilarious. The drawing’s a bit stiff but they’ve nailed their demographic deftly and in that sense the strip is extremely well done.

God, I remember this. We had WEEKLY READER in Catholic School, But by this time the art on the strip was Cartoonier , Chumpy was a HIPPO- not a monkey, but a big, childish Hippo..And they had an Alligator sidekick. The Art was definetly an improvement over what I’ve seen here.. though the writing was as innoculus as ever.

These strips are so funny! There swell!

Ooh boy, do I remember Weekly Reader. Not so much for the content, but for the fact that the teachers in my school were pushing their students to order from the Weekly Reader Book Club, or the Scholastic Book Club… as if they were getting a cut of the take.

I’m surprised how progressive the Weekly Reader was in in the 50’s for illustrating Uncle Funny Bunny and Chumpy’s obvious yet controversial life style choice.

Can no one see the obvious similarities to Family Circus?

The comedy in this is ATROCIOUS! EVERY one of them either ends a face slap, a wink, or a laugh, which just makes you want to punch them in the face even more. The jokes are stiff as wood, and the drawings look worthy to make people puke.

This is the kind of stuff that triggers homicidal psychotic episodes.
Seriously.

I think the correct categorization for this is under so-bad-it’s-good. It actually made me laugh several times just because it’s so inane and stupid. That’s not so bad. It’s the same kind of laugh I get reading Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke.

When Uncle Funny says he’s going to get the sap, Chumpy misunderstands and walks himself in circles and worries up little poofs of dust.

Sorry, but that’s cute.

Worst comic strip ever? Hardly a noble quest.

You know, I can’t help but read Mr. Bunny and Chumpy as a gay couple. The strip has this weird, winking sense of something hidden under the surface in the same way as, say, The Odd Couple or early Batman. Not that there was any intention of portraying a same-sex romantic couple in either of those, but it’s interesting to read them within that context. I guess one of the strips seems to show Chumpy in school, so maybe he’s supposed to be a child, but he’s the same size as Unfunny Bunny, and they look like they’re co-hosting a party in another one. It’s so terrible it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on, so I’m going to think of them as subversive queers.

Unfunny indeed. Just the kinda strip that inspired me to do my own cartoon strip “to confirm the notion that comedy is not funny”. Check it out…
http://objectsandthings.com/node15.htm

Wow. Now my sister’s father-in-law who had vascular dementia makes perfect sense.

the one with the soap was actually somewhat funny. The rest is terrible with no redeeming value.

Good (but really terrible) find!

the one with the soap was actually somewhat funny.

I totally agree!

This is about as bad as every Archie comic I’ve ever read.

I hate to admit… But the one with the paint on the chair kinda made me laugh.

Well, they all did… But only in the same manner that a normal person laughs at a horribly off-color joke… Not really because it’s funny, but because of how bad it is.

Actually, The one with the big horn is so absurd, It’s great

Am I the only one who thinks uncle bunny looks like Cheney, and Chumpy like Bush?

i was going to mention condorito too! that’s the worst comic strip, ever! the thing is that, at least among my friends here in mexico, nobody likes genuinely reading it: you just laugh at the lack of humor, just as you do with uncle funny bunny and chumpy.

guilty pleasure? i found the one about the treasure and the soap a good one…

plop.

ps. haven’t you tried to test uncle funny bunny with your kids? please, don’t!

Worst comic ever? Not even close. What about “Rose is Rose?” Not only isn’t it funny, but reading it is like talking to that somebody at work you know is in an abusive relationship and on the brink of total emotional collapse but they think they’re fooling you. An unflinching look into the maw of despair. This is just lame- to be the worst requires, um, toxicity. Malignancy.

You guys are being a bit harsh, I mean who among you hasn’t followed a treasure map and been sorely disappointed when the chest held nothing but a bar of soap? Not to mention the fact that your Uncle from a different species had just pointed out your bad hygiene!

Also, the one about “sap” is so horrible that it is gold!

I can’t believe you would pick on something so cute, innocent and child-oriented? Aren’t there many more deserving targets for your hipper-than-thou derision??? Not everything has to be drenched in irony to be worthy.

I also remember Uncle Funny Bunny from my childhood days. And I outgrew it. That’s very different from the cartoon that I nominate as the WORST one ever–The Family Circus. It’s been going on for almost half a century, it’s syndicated to thousands of newspapers around the world, it’s been made into several TV shows, it’s been the target of jokes and satire, and this will make many of us puke–it’s won a Reuben and many other awards.

I believe Uncle Funny Bunny was also used in a book of Christian-oriented stories we were forced to read in grammar school. In one of the stories, UFB tried to convince his readers that the theory of evolution is “ridiculous”!

Weird- I remember an old (forties) UFB workbook that focused on wildlife and reading comprehension, that I had somehow been given as a kid; the artwork wasn’t stunning, but it was far better than this. That Uncle Funny Bunny was plump, wore checkered pants, and prone to saying “Bless my ears and whiskers!” a lot.

PS: Scott, thanks for the good Captain Carrot memories.

Ned Flanders’s heaven, anyone?

Those posters who point out that this strip was aimed at small children (who probably did find it funny) are right on! Deriding comics, movies and cartoons made in a much more innocent time is getting to be a very old schtick.

I know! Blues Clues - worst crime drama ever!

BTW, BC (after Hart was saved) is the worst comic strip ever, made even worse by teh fact it was once one of the BEST ever.

These strips are fun! I’ll read them to my kids :)

wow it sucks and blows. amazing.

In “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” Harlan Ellison says that mediocrity is the only true evil. I submit, then, that by that standard, UnFunny Bunny and Chumpy are almost as bad as ebola, or maybe the Hundred Years’ War. Although I admit, there’s nothing mediocre about ebola; it’s just really unpleasant.

I nominate the “should have been buried back in the ’90s” Garfield.

Also, the comic strip “Adam” (or “Ad@m” or “Ad@m at Home”, whatever Brian Bassett calls it now) is the same stupid 3-panel strip every day. The lazy, work at home dad saying the same thing about drinking a latte. And on Sundays, it’s the same 3-panel strip just stretched out to 9 or 10 panels. I almost feel sorry for the guy—it’s like he knows that he’s no damn good, but he’s just grasping at straws, losing sleep at night that newspapers that carry him will finally catch on and say “Wait, we pay this guy for this tripe?”

Anything from the mind of Tom Battick, with both Funky Winkerbean Sucks! and Crankshaft Sucks! should be considered the Worst of All Time!

Is that monkey genuinely retarded?

Without a doubt, the worst contemporary strip is a piece of crap called RAISING HECTOR, artist Peter Ramirez, who was put into circulation probably to enhance the hispanic market. The strip looks like it was drawn by a retarded child and it’s about as hysterical as the aforementioned Bunny.

Raising Hector is an exceptionally weak strip. Conceptually, it was supposed to be about a stay-at-home dad, but never seems to stick with the premise. A few weeks ago, the mother in the strip lost her job, so the family should be without income, but that story line was never resolved. Why the boy child is obsessed with stealing his infant sister’s bottle all the time isn’t clear either, but this contrive tension is the basis for a large proportion of the strips. The art is terrible, the dialogue unnatural, and the gags laugh free. How this strip runs in proximity to Doonesbury is beyond me.

I used to read the Weekly Reader back when I was a kid. I probably laughed at some of these very comics. But to be honest…they’re pretty lame by todays standards, but I’m an adult now, so who knows.