Drunken Bakers

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

The two bakers run (or at least attempt to 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. They are drawn as - and have the personalities of - a pair of classic clown archetypes, an odd couple: the curly haired but balding one being short and aggressive, the taller being doleful. In one episode, they were drawn as wearing suits that were for the curly-haired one much too small, and for the taller one much too big - another classic clown type.

Both bakers suffer from severe alcoholism, and every strip shows them drinking strong alcoholic beverages such as various liqueurs. Their idea of a Wednesday Half-Closing is to sit on a public seat in front of a local Off-Licence, enjoying the 'view'. 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 he hasn't contacted in many years, and doesn't want to. They try their best to bake something every night, but because of their inebriation, the results are always 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". The only exception to this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the bakery, when the black-haired one decides to bake twin cakes in the form of the number 25. He succeeds, producing the number 25 in cake form, while his partner drinks mulled wine made in the kettle, which has held something nasty. In the final frame the inevitable happens - the fellow vomits up his stomach contents all over the anniversary cakes, and so their only success is utterly ruined.

Customers sometimes arrive at the baker's shop, asking for various breads or pastries, at Christmas a whole lot of Christmas Cakes, and once even a five-tiered Wedding Cake. The bakers promise they'll bake it for them, but always fail to fulfil 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 which is almost perpetually empty of produce, especially the front window, 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 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 material.

Exhibitions

In 2006 The Drunken Bakers were the subject of an exhibition by Mark Leckey at the Tate Britain.^[1]

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^[2]

"The aesthetic compression of Mr Farmer's dialogue and Mr Healey's line...convey an oppressive sense of the drinker's irresistible drive for oblivion." - Roberta Smith, New York Times^[1]

"It's brilliant." - Christopher Howse, The Daily Telegraph^[3]

References

External links

• Cartoonist Lee Healey's website