Anti Family Circus

I have long been disturbed by the supposedly delightful and gentle humor of the cartoon known as "Family Circus", appearing each day in the comics section of your local paper. Though the cartoon strives to appear completely nonoffensive by creating a portrait of an ideal and carefree young family, there is much going on below the surface. Anything beyond a superficial glance of the cartoon reveals familial disputes and burgeoning questions of sexuality that manifest themselves and shed light on the true situation at home. Clearly, all is not as it seems in the land of Bil, Thel, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Barfy, Sam, and Kittycat.

Let us take an in-depth look at the thinly-veiled family discord.


Here we see Dolly and Jeffy showing Thel that their affection for one another is merely a ruse: an attempt perhaps to gain Mommy's approval in a wicked game of sibling rivalry. Also alarmingly, Dolly appears to be smothering Jeffy in her bear hug. By Thel's blank expression, we can infer that she is not concerned by this. Maybe she would prefer it if her male middle child were only a dim and distant memory? Or maybe she is too doped up on antidepressants to even care? We may never know.


Oh, the trials and tribulations of a being a middle child: Jeffy has never been taught to read. Perhaps in a remnant of traditional educational systems, only the oldest son/heir Billy has ever been schooled. Or could it be that none of the children are educated? Why is Bil so fearful that his children will learn how to read? Is there a dirty little secret he is hiding, some dreadful skeleton in his closet? Instead of risking that his secrets ever be uncovered, he sentences them to a life of neglect and idiocy.


In this panel, one of our burning questions is answered: just what exactly is Daddy hiding? The answer, of course, is internet pornography.


Well, we can breathe a small sigh of relief. We know now that at least Billy is being educated, but upon closer examination, just what is he being taught? "Know", "Knot", "Knee", "Knob". Clearly a male figure in the family or in the educational system is soliciting Billy for oral sex. If we read between the lines, we can decipher the hidden meaning: "Know about knots [an evident argument for a bondage fetish], get on your knees and do what you will with my knob." An alarming and disturbing discovery. Just what sort of family circus is this anyway?


The homoeroticism does not stop here. Billy has obviously been affected by his sexual burdens and retreats into a life of fantasy. However, he does not dream of a normal family to take him away, one in which there are loving and devoted parents who will take him to the beach or to waterparks; hardly so, in fact. Here we see Billy, in his puffed-up rage, lost in a rêverie about the loincloth-swaddled Tarzan. In his fantasy, Tarzan is gazing intimately and intensely with burning eyes, suggesting that Billy is yearning for a romantic figure to rescue him instead of a familial one, the proverbial white knight of days-of-yore fairy tales. The question is, will Tarzan ever come for Billy?


Truth be told, I don't exactly understand what is going on in this cartoon. However, what does catch my eye is the tantalizing way Zippy the Pinhead is seducing Jeffy.


Apparently Billy is not the only child in the family with homosexual tendencies. We can infer by the fact that Thel is 'turning Jeffy's dreams off' that she does not approve of her little boy's dreams. I have a feeling Thel irrationally blames herself for Billy and so is trying to coach Jeffy to bat for what is, in her mind, "the proper team". Eventually, after Bil Sr.'s syphilitic death following an unfortunate internet encounter, she will come to accept both her boys' lifestyles and will crochet them rainbow-colored flags to proudly display on their verandahs come Pride Week.


Until that day though, Jeffy will descend into a life of illicit substance abuse, taking his youngest brother PJ with him (who sadly, would not make it out alive since, like Jeffy, PJ never learned to read and therefore could not figure out which prescription pills were not supposed to be mixed). During a particularly bad financial scrape, Jeffy sells Dolly on the black market to raise money for his next fix, thereby finally achieving revenge on his sister for treating him so poorly as a child. Dolly will be sold to the Sultan of Brunei and spend the rest of her skinny years as a sex slave. Years later, she will be found as a washed-up prostitute in a Bangkok bordello with a particular talent for ping pong balls.

Barfy, Sam, and Kittycat fled the backyard long ago. Being that they were not licensed, they were taken to the pound and eventually adopted by a nice first-generation immigrant family. They happily lived out the remainder of their years in the sun-filled countryside, at last escaping the family circus...I mean curse.