[BlueFire]

I thought that I would share an old relic that helped me get by during the whirlwind that was this year: The Dysfunctional Family Circus. Specifically, the version that was on the old comedy website Spinwebe.

The premise was of course twisting the saccharine newspaper comic The Family Circus into a dysfunctional version. A blank cartoon would be posted, and anyone who visited the site could submit a caption. To save on server space (it was the 90s) and keep the quality of the average captions high, captions would be filtered into zones, green (approved), yellow (needed tweaks to be approved), and red (rejected for being too obvious or low-quality). Only the green zone captions would be preserved.

Spinnwebe’s version started in late 1994 and went on for around 5 years. In early ‘99, the expected C&D from the syndicate that owned The Family Circus arrived, ordering the DFC’s removal. The site own Gregg (aka Spinn) originally planned to defend the DFC on the grounds of fair use, but backed down when he was informed that Bil Keane, the creator of The Family Circus was the one who instigated the notice. He and Gregg had a phone call about it. Bil admitted that he found some captions funny (likely the least filthy ones), but ultimately wished for its removal since the Keane family in the comic is a caricature of his real family, and he was getting numerous complaints from moral guardians.

After the 500th cartoon, the DFC was removed. Luckily, fans had been preserving the captions in an archive, which still exists to this day for the world to see.

While most of the captions are obviously filthy, there is still a bit of class to them (in a strange way). The best captions (IMO) are the ones that clearly were well thought out. Rather than immediately jump for the expected joke, most try to instead bring up something else, or go meta and poke fun of the painfully obvious. I also enjoy the memoir captions. They are a great example of sad comedy, interpreting the humorous antics of the characters as traumatizing events.

I find the humor to be funny, at least with most captions. While some are quite outdated in topic (remember Pauly Shore?) and non-PC by today’s standards (mostly jabs at Gays and Trans), I enjoy reading them. If anything, the archive is a nice time capsule of the pioneer era of the internet, where it was a place for computer geeks to be themselves with one another. Before corporations seized the opportunity to commercialize the service as with today.

The archive with 497 of the 500 cartoons (three have been lost to time) is here: https://dfc.furr.org/

Obviously very NSFW even if it is just text.

If anyone here remembers the site during its heyday, or even submitted captions, feel free to share your story.