B.C. parody. B.C. by Johnny Hart.
Johnny Hart didn’t actually draw this.
B.C. has got to be one of the most useless comic strips I’ve ever seen. It was a lot funnier before Johnny Hart became a Christian and felt the need to Christianize a strip which is after all about people who, as suggested by the strip’s title, live before Christ.
Every Easter strip has to be a message about how Jesus is risen (despite not yet being born), and every Christmas strip has to be about Jesus being born. Yet the strip’s events precede the Exodus, the nation of Israel, and the Roman Empire. It’s primarily about a bunch of guys in black shorts with one suspender apiece, assorted talking animals (including dinosaurs and a race of super-intelligent ants), and a proto-human caveman who is apparently a ball of fur with a mouth and feet. It’s always been that. The only things that changed after Hart became a Christian is there are less inventing-the-wheel type jokes, which he ran out of.
Instead, the strip contains lame puns, recycled one-liners, and occasional anti-idolatry or anti-evolution jabs that often don’t even make sense. (Being anti-evolution, in spite of his proto-human caveman character, never did make sense.) And the women in the strip have the rather less-than-Christian names of “the fat broad” and “the cute chick.” Hart’s Christianity is displayed on his sleeve, but you can’t find it otherwise in his strip.
Why, then, does this strip run at all in newspapers? Because American Christians like the fact that Hart displays his Christianity on his sleeve. They like a Christianity that’s all talk and no inward change. It resembles theirs.
So Hart’s strip will stay in newspapers until he dies, and if you’re a fan of irony it will be ever so amusing when the syndicate hands off his strip to a pro-evolution non-Christian who starts telling caveman jokes again and infuriates B.C.’s fan base.
Update, 12/13/2024: Hart died in 2007, and his grandson Mason Mastroianni produces the strip now, with the help of his brother and mom. It’s still kinda Christian, ’cause the Mastroiannis are Christian, but way less preachy. It’s even, occasionally, funny. And the women were finally given proper names; “Fat Broad” became Jane, and “Cute Chick” became Grace.