Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for February 13, 2025

Since when was any kind of intelligence a thing in the Funkyverse?

Huh? What happened to the drunk mayor? A crystal ball is AI? Oh, Ed, you were doing so well this week, and now… I’m not mad, but I am disappointed.

♪♫ He said, "Marie Laveau, you lovely witch

Gimme a little charm that’ll make me rich

Gimme a million dollars and I tell you what I’ll do

This very night, I’m gonna marry you"

Then it’ll be (mmmmmm…), another man done gone ♪♫

Sign says hypnotist, not a fortune teller.

So was Washington DC

Crystal GPT eh.

Artificial Bullschit too..

This means Madam Marie (the fortune teller who would go on to encounter Les, Lisa, Crazy Harry and Donna in Act II) is much older than Ed, and is possibly ageless

This was clever.

Once again, artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

And you never did make it to the big leagues!

too bad batty writes this stuff so far in advance a fortune teller could have told him he should be doing jokes about the price of eggs hed have material for weeks

Crankshaft, you are artificial intelligence. In fact your intelligence is about as artificial as it gets.

Calling a fortune teller a hypnotist is exactly the kind of mistake LLM-style AI’s make. Maybe this strip was created by BattyGPT.

I like the little detail in panel two, where you can’t tell whether that little pink sausage is Old Guy 3’s ear or Ed’s finger trying to stir the biscuits and gravy on his plate. Copy-paste “art” at its finest!

Before China …..and a lot cheaper!!!!

The bunko squad is outside the tent

That’s what I’m talking about!

They just played a story on the radio of a woman who paid a psychic over $50,000 for love advice, and finally realized she was being scammed.

Did Ed even make the Mud Hens?

You will be a driving force for 40 something [unintelligible]mates.

A thought I’ve had at times, in my more misanthropic moments, is to go to a psychic store like this and just sit down without saying a single word and be as passively aggressive as possible the entire time just to see what happens.

Enter. Sit down. 10 seconds pass. 30. A minute. I am silently staring at the seer the entire time. Finally, the silence breaks.

“Can I… help you?”, they ask.

“Hey, you’re the psychic – you should already know if you can help me or not.”

I won’t actually do this, but I do wonder just how long I could string something like that out.