The Dysfunctional Family Circus was the name of several long-running parodies of the syndicated comic stripThe Family Circus, featuring either Bil Keane's artwork with altered captions, or original artwork made to appear like the targeted strips. First distributed anonymously by mail and fax in 1989, by 1994 various versions of it began to appear on the World Wide Web. The most popular version, edited by Greg Galcik, began in 1995 and ceased in 1999 following a telephone conversation between Galcik and Keane.
DFC booklets
The Dysfunctional Family Circus was created and began circulating anonymously in 1989 as a series of booklets found in record and book stores, coffee houses and nightclubs in several U.S. and European cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London and Madrid. They were also distributed by mail to those making requests and posting their mailing address to select Usenet groups. The booklet series included 15 titles:
Each booklet measured 4-1/4" x 5.5" and was attributed to an anonymous publisher whose name was a unique anagram of "Bil Keane". A French translation of volume No. 4, entitled "Qui Veut Voir Un Hamster Dansant?" was distributed by mail, as was an unnumbered volume entitled "Guess Where I Can Fit This!" The booklets spawned two annual calendars, a T-shirt, and a set of drink coasters, before being retired.
Publication
The first two issues were 16 pages each. Issue three expanded to 40 pages. The remaining issues in the main series were 32 pages apiece. The initial press run for each issue was 250 copies. Issues five and eight had secondary runs of 100 copies each. Several cartoons from the booklets were reprinted in the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Boonville, California, and Browbeat magazine. Others were reproduced in fanzines and as inserts for CDs by the National Hardwood Floor Association and others. Only one cartoon used the original cartoon caption.
Often called "DFC", the Dysfunctional Family Circus was first brought to the World-Wide Web by Mark Jason Dominus around March 1994. This version featured one original Keane cartoon without captions, and ran submission software to allow viewers to suggest their own captions. Captions were mostly unfiltered. It was discontinued after about a year, and the concept was adopted by Greg Galcik.
Galcik's version
Galcik's version became the best known and ran on SpinnWebe from June 1995 to 1999 with a run of exactly 500 comics. It attracted between 50,000 and 70,000 page views per day. Galcik and other editors would select the captions they considered to be the funniest and most original, which would then be saved in an online archive. The humor of these captions ranged from what many would consider the disgusting to the surreal, and from the low-brow to the cerebral. Bil Keane was aware of the site's existence from early on and initially had no objection to it, stating that the jokes were sometimes better than his own. He later sent a cease-and-desist letter which caused the site to be taken down. Several running jokes developed over the 500 strip run of the series. Recurring themes included incest and child abuse jokes, and aspects of the art itself, such as the featureless void, and Jeffy's Hypno-Hair. The parents infidelity towards each other was often a source of humor, with Thel claiming to not know who any of the children's real fathers are and Bil's unseen homosexual lover "Uncle" Roy. Another running joke involved breaking the fourth wall and commenting on what Bil drew in the strip that day, such as when Thel was vacuuming with many toys strewn about, one such caption was "That dickhead Bil would draw all this shit in here the one day I vacuum!", and the children were aware that they were stuck within the "circle" that outlined the strip, such as when the scene was full of Christmas presents, a submitted caption was "I tell, ya we could hawk more stuff if you just made the circle bigger!"
End of Galcik's DFC
In September 1999, Galcik received a warning letter from King Features Syndicate, citing copyright violations on the site. Despite the support of the site's fans, Galcik complied after a phone conversation with Keane. In his closing statement, Galcik said while he believed that Dysfunctional Family Circus could be defended as a work of interactive parody, he had developed a grudging respect for the long and continual effort by Bil Keane. Galcik noted that Keane was both polite and gracious in his request for the strip to end, pointing out that the characters being parodied were based on Keane's own family. Keane also agreed to allow Galcik to continue the strip for an additional week in order to reach strip No. 500. The captions for the 500th and final strip were completed in November 1999. Despite King Features' wishes, archives of the series have repeatedly appeared in various sites around the web. SpinnWebe continued to run "It's A Dysfunctional Life", which was similar to the Dysfunctional Family Circus, but used viewer-submitted photographs instead of Family Circus cartoons.
