I don’t have much time to share with you today. This is one of Funsville’s grandest civic occasions—the eve of St. Theobald of Vico’s Day. On the first day of June, the citizens of our fair conurbation observe the feast day of the aforementioned St. T. of V., the patron saint of porters and bellhops. Known popularly in these precincts as “Schlep’s Day”, this observance has been extended to include all those who fetch, carry, tote and haul things on behalf of others. From midnight on St. Theobald’s Eve until the wee hours of June 2, the streets of Funsville ring with the traditional festive greeting of “get it yourself, loser”. (If you ever plan to live in the metropolitan Funsville area, this is the one day of the year to avoid scheduling a house move.)

  So, before I head down to the Funsville dockyards for the traditional Gathering of Disinterested Bystanders Who Watch Nothing Specific Happen to Stacks of Unladed Cargo, I’d better keep the pot boiling on the story I’ve been telling you…

   We left Sparky both trapped and lost in an alternate universe of television programs. After being ousted from his post as head string-puller in a puppet dictatorship of Planet Earth, Sparky disappeared more quickly and completely than Morgan Stanley’s credibility after the Facebook IPO.

   That little joke for the Wall Street junkies in the audience aside, this development promised to make retrieving Sparky from the alternate universe even more difficult than before. As M’Dear, Moose, Science Boy and I were pondering our options, a shadow appeared in our midst.

   The voice coming from the owner of the shadow was familiar to one of us:

  It’s…PROFESSOR PROTEUS—! Science Boy yelped, with the same intonation you might expect to hear from someone who’s just received a hot-foot while sitting on a tack.

   “Why must you always overact your reactions to my entrances?” Professor Proteus snapped at him. “It completely shatters the dramatic tension of the moment.”

   “Oh, who died and made you Stanislavsky?” Science Boy shot back.

   Before this discussion of acting technique could go any further, Moose turned to face Professor Proteus. “Listen—” she started, and then stopped abruptly, before explaining why she’d stopped. “There’s nothing there.”

   “I’m still here,” replied Professor Proteus. “It’s not my fault you can’t see me.”

   Science Boy took it upon himself to clarify matters. “Professor Proteus has changed his appearance so many times that he has no recognizable physical form…unless you’ve seen him before, in which case he looks the way he did when you last saw him.”

   Moose avoided asking for a further clarification on how that was possible, and moved on to a simpler question. “How can he cast a shadow, then?”

   “Force of habit,” Professor Proteus replied. That was good enough for all of us.

   Science Boy steered the conversation down a new track. “State your business, you foul and odious villain.”   

   “Your dialogue is just as overblown as your acting—honestly,” was what Professor Proteus said instead. “A simple “What brings you here?” would have done nicely.”

   “So…er, what does bring you here?” I asked, in an attempt to get things back on to a topic they’d never gotten on to in the first place.

   “I heard of your (ha hum…) little problem and I thought I might offer my help.”

   “We don’t need your help,” sniffed Science Boy.

   An out-of cadence chorus of voices from the rest of us countered with various phrasings of the opinion that we’d take anybody’s help at this stage.

   “Good,” said Professor Proteus, considering the matter settled. “It just so happens that I have a new piece of apparatus that I wish to test on a subject who can be deemed, shall we say…expendable.”

   Murmurs from the rest of us circled around the general point that Sparky was by no means expendable, but that we no longer had anything to lose.

   “As I understand it,” Professor Proteus went on, “your main difficulty is that your carrot-topped little friend is trapped in a narrative which is not entirely of his own making, and that you have no means to get him out of it.”

   No murmurs or anything from us this time—just nodding.

   “And this is where my new invention comes in,” Professor Proteus continued. He stepped towards a strategically-placed tarpaulin, and pulled it aside.

   “Behold—THE CONTRIVED PLOT DEVICE—!”

   “Now who’s overacting?” grumbled Science Boy in a time-consuming aside.

   “But does it work?” asked Moose, ever the practical one.

   “Does it work?” chuckled Professor Proteus, in a sinister fashion. “It’s just supplied this story with an entire chapter of padding to spin things out and add suspense before the climax.”

   We couldn’t argue with that.

   How does the Contrived Plot Device work? What does it do? Why is it customary to ask your audience three questions when leaving them hanging at the end of an instalment of a serial? At least one of these questions will be answered once, if not for all, when next we meet…assuming you can’t guess the answers before then, which I bet you can’t.

Uncle Fun

Every cartoonist has to get at least one of these out of his system…

   This week’s edition of The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan doesn’t necessarily prove that comics can be spoken of in the same breath with fine art:

In fact, I’m not sure it proves anything at all.

   This posting is a couple of days later than I’d planned. Electricity has just been restored to the Greater Funsville Area, after a thunderstorm knocked out a local generating station. No lightning struck the power plant itself, but the thunder scared off the hamsters that run inside the turbines. Now that they’ve been herded up and returned safely to their wheels, our story continues…

   When last we left you dangling from the edge of a narrative cliff, Sparky had just risen to dizzying heights in the alternate universe of television he had found himself in. After plunging the entire civilized world into disarray, he installed himself as the puppet-master of a New World Order whose nominal leader was veteran character actor Wilford Brimley.

   As you may remember, in this universe, the dividing line between life in the real world and life in the world of television was even less clear than it is in ours. So, the first thing Sparky’s junta did to consolidate its hold on power was to forcibly remove an extensive list of television programs from the air, sending their casts to remote, windswept islands off the coast of Antarctica. The decisions concerning which shows were spared followed a rationale that was, to say the least, highly personal.

   By and large, the people acquiesced to this sweeping cull…until Sparky went one step too far, and set his sights on Full House.

   In keeping with the inexplicable popularity of the show itself, the decision to “cancel” Full House touched off an inexplicable popular revolt. Public support began to coalesce behind a newfound champion of liberty—the erstwhile soap star, part-time rock-and-roller and Full House cast member known as John Stamos.

   Getting wind of the news that Stamos’ followers had taken to calling him “Uncle Jesse” (after the name of his character on Full House), a group of radical fans of Denver Pyle from The Dukes of Hazzard took the law into their own hands. Styling themselves “The Sons of The True Uncle Jesse”, they launched an insurrection of their own.

   The immediate result was something akin to pandemonium, only far less structured. The Uncle Jesse schism soon led to a proliferation of uncle-led splinter groups, starting with Uncle Charley from My Three Sons…

   …followed in due course by Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction…

   …then, in rapid succession, Uncle Captain Huffenpuff from Beany and Cecil…

   …Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air…

   …and the usually funny Kevin Meany’s late, lamentable version of Uncle Buck.

   Things didn’t go particularly well for anyone in particular after that. In the midst of the confusion, Sparky, like any good usurper who sees the handwriting on the wall, dropped completely out of sight.

   Gratified as I was that Sparky was putting vital life lessons I had taught him into practice, his skill at hiding wasn’t going to make it any easier to get him out of the world he was trapped in and back to this one. We had no time to come up with a new rescue plan, though, for even as we watched these latest developments, a sinister shadow drew across the TV screen…

   Science Boy didn’t even have to turn around to recognize the stranger.

  It’s…PROFESSOR PROTEUS—! he shrieked.

   Whatever can this mean, gentle readers (and rough ones as well)? I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another week (or less, I hope) to find that out. In any case, I’d better sign off now. The lights just flickered, and I hear the telltale sound of squeaking coming from under the sofa. Time to call Funsville Light and Power, and break out the net I keep handy for such occasions.

Uncle Fun

Amused or not, here it is…

The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan goes out this week to our legion of readers in Canada:

They probably don’t need this to remind them who’s to thank for them getting Monday off.

Happy Carlos May Day, everybody:

   Funsville is shut down today, as it is on this day every year, to honour the workers of the world whose jobs require them to wear name tags. This observance takes its own name from Carlos May, the only Major League baseball player (so far) to have his birthdate displayed on the back of his uniform. Before I slap a blank “Hi, my name is” sticker on my lapel and join the rest of the throng at the Ceremonial Procession of Garage Mechanics With Embroidered Overalls at Historic Funtown Square, I’ll get you caught up on the story I’ve been telling you...

   When last we left the VHF-exiled Sparky, he had just set up shop in the comfortably cartoony and surreal world of British TV’s The Avengers:

   However, a jealous Moose soon put paid to that becoming a permanent arrangement:

   Booted into the hostile, paranoid realm of The Prisoner, Sparky landed on his feet, as the heir apparent to Number 2:

   Once Sparky took full charge of the penal colony known as the Village, his interest in getting information from Number 6 seemed scant at best:

   He soon wrote off the interrogation as a dead loss:

   This freed him up to implement a grand geopolitical design, using futuristic brainwashing techniques and good old-fashioned divide-and-conquer tactics:

   None of this significantly altered the fate of the Nixon administration. However, that wasn’t Sparky’s plan. Instead, he concentrated on Henry Kissinger’s later exploits—specifically, his part-ownership of the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos.

   With Dr. Kissinger in his thrall, Sparky turned the Cosmos into a force to be reckoned with, both on and off the field of play. Not only did they import international soccer stars such as Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer…

   …but they also effected several changes to the rules of soccer, through Kissinger’s diplomatic skills and finesse. One of these permitted the use of poison-tipped umbrellas during stoppage time, and made a hitherto-unknown Bulgarian midfielder known only as Igor the most feared man on three continents.

   It soon became apparent that Sparky’s Cosmos were out to do more than just kick a ball around for 90 minutes while running themselves into chronic shin splints. During one memorable exhibition tour, no less than seventeen instances of full-scale regime change coincided with the Cosmos’ matches against well-known soccer clubs.

   The ensuing global chaos soon gave the ideal pretext for Kissinger (or rather, Sparky) to propose that a single world government be instituted to restore order. When this came about, the leader of the newly unified Planet Earth was a likeable but harmless figurehead…

   No—it was Wilford Brimley, the beloved character actor who specialized in curmudgeonly yet cuddly grandfather-figures, most notably in commercials for processed oatmeal. His words of avuncular wisdom helped to soften the hammer blows of the totalitarianism that followed:

   Those of you who think that no good can possibly come of this situation are probably right…but you’ll definitely have to wait until the next chapter to find out how.  

Uncle Fun

‘M’ is probably not for ‘M-unition’…

This instalment of The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan reminds you to let Mom do her own thing on Mother’s Day:

Too much of this thing, though, and Dad may not make it to Father’s Day.

Does the English Channel pause for station identification…?

   Well, here we are again, at the start of another chapter of Sparky’s adventures in exile in an alternate dimension of long-lost TV broadcasts. Here’s how we got to where I’m about to tell you we’ve gotten to:

    After several failed attempts to release Sparky using her own special brand of off-white magic, Milady M’Dear made one last-ditch effort:

   Unfortunately, her effort shot Sparky clean over the last ditch, and clear across the Pond:

   Once in Ye Merrie Olde England of Ye Merrie Olde Telly, Sparky apparently had time to stop by Carnaby Street before butting in on David Frost and the cast of That Was The Week That Was:

   He then finagled his way onto an ancient episode of Doctor Who by passing himself off as a younger incarnation of Tom Baker:

   On an even older episode of the same program, Sparky (or at the very least, someone who shared his sense of the perverse) appeared to have gotten behind the controls of a Dalek:

   Whoever that particular denizen of the planet Skaro may have been, the effects of the alternate dimension seem to have made England even smaller than it is in our world, since Sparky certainly had no trouble getting around, and then some. After a musical interlude sitting in with The Who on Ready Steady Go! …

   …and a moment of quiet comic relief hanging around on Hancock’s Half Hour…

   …he managed to insinuate himself into The Avengers:

   Moose’s reaction to competition from an eternally youthful Diana Rigg (and a host of eternally youthful stunt women doing her action sequences) was not without a certain timelessness of its own:

   The fallout from this display of petulance and percussive maintenance was an uncharacteristic moment of mute pathos:

   The silence was broken by a question:

   This was followed by an answer, and more questions:

   Then, a familiar voice chimed in:

   Moose’s pedal application of force majeure had knocked Sparky into the chillingly Kafkaesque Cold War nightmare world of The Prisoner…and, even more chillingly, into a position of authority there:

   “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is all I have to say…to anyone who has a Latin phrasebook handy, that is. If any good at all is to come of this situation, we won’t find out about it until the next chapter…see you then.

Uncle Fun