How Comics Curmudgeon Funnies the Funnies

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Photo via Josh Fruhlinger - Instagram

Josh Fruhlinger

Josh Fruhlinger

Newspaper comics aren’t only a source of laughter in and of themselves. Joking about them can be pretty funny, too. 

Or so Josh Frulhinger proves most every day on his Comics Curmudgeon blog (joshreads.com). Fruhlinger regularly snarks on a half-dozen of the funnies carried in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; and he is approaching his 20th anniversary. 

“I guess the main thing,” Fruhlinger explains as to the origin of his comics critiques, “is that, even 20 years ago, they seemed like a relic of a different cultural age, particularly the soap opera comics I loved so much. They are a unique art form slotted into a very specific niche, and they are something that at one point almost everybody read but few people thought about seriously.” 

Frulinger takes comics seriously enough to point out every morning their inconsistencies, and absurdities—and occasionally offer sincere praise for a well-executed joke—a task he took upon himself with no experience but writing occasional college newspaper columns. “I actually had never done any formal humor writing before I started my blog,” he admits. 

Daily Practice

Since Fruhlinger has parlayed his comic strip blogging experience into regular in-person comedy gigging in his current hometown of Los Angeles (he moved from the hotbed  of humor that is Baltimore several years ago), Fruhlinger affirms, “I definitely credit the daily practice of writing the blog as helping me understand the rhythm of writing jokes and being funny, and also just giving me the muscle of being able to sit down and churn out some serviceably funny paragraphs on short notice.”  

Among those taking notice of Fruhlinger's blog are the current creators of his most beloved of soap opera strips: Mary Worth. 

“Some years ago a package arrived in the mail addressed to me with (Worth writer) Karen Moy’s return address on it—I do not know how she got my address—containing some Mary Worth-themed t-shirts and a lovely note; obviously I posted the pics and told people where to buy them, which was no doubt their intention,” Fruhlinger recalls. As to the appeal of Moy’s and artist June Brigman’s serial strip, he explains, “Mary is just the archetypical example of a soap opera comic strip. The writing manages to seem unironic, even though Moy and Brigman are actually very engaged in online commentary on the official King site. We have not really interacted much but they're aware of me and I think their attitude is friendly.” 

Fruhlinger has at least as much fun with gag-a-day comics as he does with those employing narrative continuity. One of his favorites among the former is a strip that intersects with a historical period in which he has great interest. “Obviously the anachronisms are the whole joke of Hagar the Horrible,” Fruhlinger emphasizes, “which is a standard domestic life comic strip that happens to be set in the Viking era. That's what makes it funny! I just happen to be fascinated by early medieval history, and I find being persnickety about the historical accuracy of a strip that was never meant to be historically accurate to be a funny running bit. If this helps educate readers about the 8th and 9th centuries, so much the better!”

Same Old Stuff

Better also would be if individual newspaper staffs picked the features carried on comics pages. This contrasts with Journal Sentinel owner Gannett’s current practice of assigning the same strips to each of its daily papers. “Basically, Gannett negotiated a single set of comics for all its papers rather than letting individual papers choose. Pretty depressing in my opinion!” Fruhlinger offers. That company’s homogeneity in comics contrasts to part of the artform’s appeal of the as once manifested in different dailies. 

He elaborates, “The traditional experience of reading the comics in the paper isn’t so much about the physical medium as the delivery method: you read the comics that were in your paper, and you got what you got. Sometimes you would visit another city and open their paper and have the destabilizing experience of seeing they had a bunch of comics you'd never heard of! 

“Now. of course. you can find every comic you want instantly, but it’s not the same experience of having a predefined set integrated into a larger ritual of reading the paper.” Fruhlinger draws a parallel to viewing video content nowadays, “I would actually say its analogous to the shift from turning on the TV to see ‘what's on’ to streaming.” 

Comics Curmudgeon has kept going through changing times. “There have been a few other comics blogs over the years, but none have had the pure dogged determination to keep doing it as I have, I guess! And now that blogs are no longer the hot new thing, I no longer worry about competition. There are benefits to irrelevance!” he insists.

Though Fruhlinger doesn't do it often any longer, this set from 2013 at a club in his old Maryland stomping grounds proves he has what it takes to engage an audience with stand-up comedy, as he does here with bits about a possible origin story for Hooters restaurants, American Sign Language’s problematic hand gestures for different ethnicities and his own Jewishness, among others...

In Memoriam

A recognizable face and quirky comedic presence since the mid-1970s in television, movies and a clutch of musical comedy albums, Martin Mull died at 80 of a long-term illness in late June 2024. 

After parlaying his Southern California nightclub act into a recording contract, Mull broke through on the small screen with a role on soap opera spoof “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” Not long thereafter, he graduated to hosting the talk show parody “Fernwood 2night” (later “America 2night”). In an IMDb CV that runs up to 2023, other Mull TV credits of note include his characters on “Arrested Development,” “Roseanne” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Numbering among the movies to which he lent his funny flair are Mrs. Doubtfire, Clue, and Jingle All the Way.