The Family Circus (originally, The Family Circle) is a syndicated comic strip created and written by cartoonist Bil Keane and colored and inked 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.

Description

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The comics depict the childhood antics of Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and P.J., fictionalized versions of the author's own children (and now, grandchildren). Their parents Bill and Thel are based on Keane and his wife Thelma. The family has two dogs, Barfy and Sam, and a cat, Kittycat. Grandma makes frequent appearances.

Recurring concepts include the spirits of deceased relatives observing the family (Grandpa being the most common), ghostly imps named "Not Me," "Nobody" and "Ida Know" who watch while the children try to shift blame for a misdeed with a "not me" or an "I dunno", a day or week when Bill turns over the strip to Billy and it is drawn in an intentionally childish style, as if the character Billy was actually drawing it, and an overhead map of the neighborhood where the children's paths are followed with a dotted line.

Parody

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While the series remains popular in the U.S., some attribute to it a dated feeling, a sterility of humor, and a mawkish sentimentality. This has made the strip a popular target of satirists, including the notorious Dysfunctional Family Circus parody. The 1999 film Go includes a Family Circus rant, made with the approval of creator Keane, who took the ribbing in stride. Pearls Before Swine went so far as to make a parody of the strip which had the family sheltering Osama bin Laden, the joke being that the family was so out of touch that it didn't know who bin Laden was. Fans defend the series as an endearing depiction of life's sweeter moments, and a reminder of simple Christian values; most of the strip's critics cynically pan it for the same reasons.

It has also become common practice on Amazon.com for reviewers to mock the simplistic humor of Family Circus by pretending to read deep meaning into Keane's silly puns and observations; other reviewers would then moderate these comments up, far beyond the regular comments made on the books, causing these to be the most prominent and highest rated reviews for the books Amazon has since purged some of the reviews for vulgar content, but for the most part, the Family Circus books on Amazon have a higher rate of false reviews than the rest of its catalog. This phenomenon has been seen to a lesser extent on other review sites, including Barnes and Noble [http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0449148157&itm=29#CRV. As a joke, in 8-Bit Theater Fighter sometimes laughs at random times while thinking of the Family Circus.

Another parody of the strip is The Other Family.

External links

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• 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.

Comic strips