Drunken Bakers

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The Drunken Bakers are characters in the British adult humour magazine Viz created by Barney Farmer and Lee Healey.

The two bakers run a bakery together. Their names have never been mentioned; one has sparse black hair, the other has a bulbous nose and large phiz of fair (possibly blond) hair giving him a slight physical resemblance to Harpo Marx. Both bakers suffer from severe alcoholism, and every strip shows them drinking strong alcoholic beverages such as various liqueurs. Hints have been made in the strip that the curly-haired one has an estranged daughter, and the black-haired one has (or had) a brother whom he hasn't contacted in many years. They try their best to bake something every night, but because of their severe inebriation, the results are always completely hopeless. If they even manage to bake something, it is often inedible, sometimes even toxic. For instance in one episode they baked cakes made with paraffin instead of milk - "This milk is blue and it tastes funny".

Customers sometimes arrive at the baker's shop, asking for various kinds of breads or pastries. The bakers promise they'll bake it for them, but always fail to fulfill their promise. Recent strips have featured one of the protagonists being hospitalised with renal failure while the other drinks rum at his bedside. Their shop has been vandalised many times, and has burnt down several times, generally due to them leaving the oven on and falling into a drunken stupor.

The presentation of the strip portrays a fatalistic style, where it is obvious that the bakers will never reform, their customers will never get proper service, and no-one is doing a thing about it. Some storylines simply fail to resolve themselves and end indeterminately, reinforcing the character's cyclical and depressing existence. (In a recent strip, one of the bakers is bitten by a stray dog he has befriended, but he doesn't notice. "Your mouth is pissing blood" remarks the other baker).

Whereas most of the comics in Viz have traditional hand-lettered captions and dialogue, the Drunken Bakers strip instalments (and other, less regular strips by Farmer & Healey) have typeset speech balloons. This gives Farmer & Healey's work a significantly different appearance from other Viz fare.

[edit] Exhibitions

In 2006 The Drunken Bakers were the subject of an exhibition by Mark Leckey at the Tate Britain.

[edit] Critical Acclaim

The Strip and the Tate Britain exhibition have received wide critical acclaim from both the art and literary worlds:

I think the Drunken Bakers is like Samuel fucking Beckett or something. It's horrible and really funny. - Alan Moore

Comedy drunks have been around since drinks first began, but few have been so utterly forlorn as the Drunken Bakers. - Steve Lowe,The Guardian

The aesthetic compression of Mr Farmer's dialogue and Mr Healey's line...convey an oppressive sense of the drinkers irresistible drive for oblivion. - Roberta Smith, New York Times

It's brilliant. - Christopher Howse, The Daily Telegraph