The Family Circus

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A early strip featuring (L to R) Daddy (Bill), Dolly, Billy, Mommy (Thel), and Jeffy. A fourth child, PJ, was introduced in 1962

The Family Circus (originally, The Family Circle) is a syndicated comic strip created and written by cartoonist Bil Keane and inked/colored by his son, Jeff Keane. The strip generally uses a single captioned panel with a round border, hence the original name of the series, which was changed following objections from Family Circle, the magazine of the same name. The series has been in continuous production since 1960, and according to publisher King Features Syndicate, it is the most widely syndicated cartoon series in the world. Compilations of Family Circus comic strips have sold over thirteen million copies worldwide.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Family

The central characters of the Family Circus are a family whose surname is never mentioned. The parents, Bill and Thelma (Thel), are modeled after the author and his wife, Thelma Carne Keane. Their four children, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and PJ, are fictionalized composites of the Keanes' five children. With the exception of PJ, the characters have never aged appreciably during the run of the strip.

Bill works in an office, though the details of his job are never disclosed. Bill is a veteran of World War II.

Thel is a college-educated homemaker. The Los Angeles Times ran a feature article on the Thelma character when Keane updated her hairstyle in 1995.

The oldest child is seven-year-old Billy. A recurring theme involves Billy as a substitute cartoonist, generally filling in for the Sunday strip. The strips purportedly drawn by Billy are crudely drawn. Keane modeled Billy after his oldest son, Glen, now a prominent Disney animator.

Five-year-old Dolly is the only girl in the family. Dolly is modeled after Keane's daughter and oldest child, Gayle. "Dolly" was Gayle's pet name as a child.

Three-year-old Jeffy is named for Keane's son (and now assistant) Jeff Keane.

Youngest child PJ was introduced to the strip in 1962 and is the only character to have aged appreciably over the course of the strip. PJ was introduced as an infant and gradually grew to be about eighteen months old. PJ rarely speaks.

[edit] Extended Family

Bill's mother (Grandma) appears regularly in the strip and apparently lives near the family. Bill's father (Grandpa) is dead but occasionally appears in the strip as a spirit. His father (as a spirit) plays a prominent role in the TV special Family Circus Christmas.

Thel's parents are both living but apparently live several hundred miles away in a rural area. The family occasionally visits their farm for vacation.

[edit] Pets

The family has two dogs, Barfy and Sam, and a cat named Kittycat.

[edit] Gremlins

In the 1970s, Keane introduced an invisible gremlin named "Not Me", who watch while the children try to shift blame for a misdeed with a "not me". Additional gremlins named "Ida Know" and "Nobody" were introduced in later years.

[edit] Other Characters

• Morrie is a playmate of Billy's and the only recurring African-American character in the strip.
• Mr. Horton is Bill's boss.

[edit] Format

[edit] Daily strip

The daily strip consists of a single captioned panel with a round border. The panel is occasionally split in two halves. One unusual practice in the series is the occasional use of both speech balloons within the picture and captions outside the circle. The daily strip does not generally follow a weekly arc, with the exception of family vacations.

[edit] Sunday strip

The format of the Sunday strip varies considerably from week to week, though there are several well-known recurring concepts and themes. Among the most popular are the "dotted line" comics, showing the characters' paths through the neighborhood or house followed by a thick dotted line. This concept has been parodied by other comic strips, including For Better or For Worse, Mother Goose and Grimm, and Marvin.

Other recurring concepts include a single picture surrounded by multiple speech balloons, representing the childrens' response to the given scenario.

[edit] Religious Themes

One distinguishing characteristic of the Family Circus is the frequent use of Christian imagery and themes, ranging from generic references to God to Jeffy daydreaming about Jesus at the grocery store. Keane states that the religious content reflects his own upbringing and family traditions. Though Keane and his family are Catholic, the family in the strip attends worship services which are clearly Christian but of no specific denomination.[1]

[edit] Television

The Family Circus has inspired three television specials: A Special Valentine with the Family Circus (1978), A Family Circus Christmas (1979), and A Family Circus Easter (1982).

[edit] Parody

The Family Circus has been widely parodied or satirized in film, television, internet media, and other daily comic strips. In an interview with the Washington Post, Keane insists that he is flattered and believes that such parody "...is a compliment to the popularity of the feature..."[2] The official Family Circus website contains an archive of syndicated comic strips from other authors which parody his characters.

Of particular note is the now-defunct Dysfunctional Family Circus website, which paired Keane's illustrations with user-submitted captions. While Keane claims to have found the site funny at first, reader feedback coupled with a trend towards double entendre and vulgarity inconsistent with Keane's Catholic values prompted him to request the site be discontinued.

On Amazon.com and related sites some of the highest rated reviews for Family Circus merchandise are parody reviews.[3]. Though Amazon regularly purges many of these reviews for vulgar content, the Family Circus books on Amazon maintain a higher rate of false reviews than most of its catalog. A recurring sentiment is that author Bil Keane is evil or megalomaniacal.

[edit] References in Popular Culture

• In the 1999 film, Go, Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant) tells Clair Montgomery (Katie Holmes) that he hates the Family Circus as he reads a newspaper. He says it's just sitting there in the bottom left corner of the page, "waiting to suck"
• In the episode of The Simpsons, "Homer Simpson, This is Your Wife", Homer collects all 40 years of the comic strip The Family Circus, and then (with an indifferent "eh") throws it in the fire.
• In the defunct Chris Elliott series, Get a Life (TV series), Elliott refers to the Family Circus as being "fall down funny".
• In episode 424 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel invents a device called the Cartuner that takes two newspaper strips and synthesizes them into one. When he combines The Family Circus with The Far Side it produces a comic with Billy being chased by jackals, accompanied by the familiar dotted line.
• The Pinky and the Brain episode "The Pink Candidate" centers around Pinky writing to a newspaper editor over his concern about The Family Circus' lack of humor and becoming elected president after a long string of misunderstandings and manipulation by Brain, only to be removed from office after Bil Keane finds evidence of Brain's world-domination plans.
• The online comic The Perry Bible Fellowship featured a Family Circus parody in a strip entitled Way Too Much.
• Comic strip Pearls Before Swine has a story arc which had the Family Circus characters sheltering Osama bin Laden. In an August 13, 2006 strip, Pearls Before Swine involved Pig and Rat musing on comic strip characters who never age. The last panel shows Dolly and Jeffy as adults, with Jeffy being drunk and wanting a martini badly.
• In the October 8, 2000 strip of Kevin and Kell, a dotted line is traced around the Dewclaws' yard, and names of various species are posted along the route. At the end, it is revealed that Coney, a carnivorous infant rabbit, traveled that route and ate all eight species there, and apparently, the "Not Me" gremlin.
• In 8-Bit Theater Fighter sometimes laughs at random times while thinking of the Family Circus.
• On Late Night with David Letterman during the 1980s, a recurring segment involved the show's senior writer, Gerard Mulligan, coming onstage with an album of Family Circus cartoons that he clipped and saved. He and Letterman would then read a few selections and engage in banal chit-chat, usually explaining the joke of each clipping despite it being fairly obvious. The skits would usually end with a non sequitur punchline, such as a girder falling from the ceiling and knocking Mulligan unconscious.
• In the Drawn Together episode "Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree," Billy is shown having murdered his entire family. When a hostage negotiator tells Billy that his mom says God doesn't want him to kill people, Billy replies, "Mommy will live inside me forever!" He then eats Thel's heart just before killing himself. Later in the episode, a newspaper is shown saying that Not Me was responsible, even though he was shown burned alive among Billy's other victims.

[edit] External links

• The Family Circus Official Homepage
• The Family Circus at King Features
• Toonopedia
• Amazon reviews on Family Circus books… - a blog post analyzing reviews from Amazon.com that have since been removed from the site.
• - Washington Post interview with Bil Keane (2002)

[edit] Parody and Satire

• The Nietzsche Family Circus - The Family Circus strips captioned with randomly selected Nietzsche aphorisms.
• "The Family Circuss" - Recaptioned Family Circus cartoons.
• The Other Family