In a Family Way With Funnies

Jim and Barbara Dale are in the funny business. Or funnies business. Or funny businesses.

Jim Dale is the sort of person who can write the words for an entire line of greeting cards and a syndicated comic strip--pursuits that to others might constitute one or two full-time jobs--while holding down another full-time job: creative director at W. B. Doner Advertising Agency in Baltimore.

Often, he does his writing while flying to and from his advertising appointments. “I alternate between writing and crossword puzzles. You can do 10 to 12 or 30 (comic lines) depending upon how hot you are. I don’t consider it work, I find it relaxing.”

“Isn’t that weird?” says Barbara Dale.

Weird or not, it works out well because she is the sort of person who can see life in a snapshot kind of way--she illustrates her husband’s words, working in a white studio filled with bright light and antique toys in a rented, second-floor apartment.

Of course, there is some crossover: Barbara writes some of the funny phrases and both Dales have yea- or naysaying power over their work.

Whoever does whatever, the Dale team is successful. In the last decade, the Dales’ collective sense of humor has grown from a single joke over dinner into a line of greeting cards, calendars, books and coffee mugs now marketed by Recycled Paper Products and sold internationally.

The newest effort of Dale Enterprises is a comic strip called “The Stanley Family,” which will appear in (at last count) 41 newspapers in the United States and Canada.

The comic strip is about a family that “just has too many jobs,” Barbara says. Too many jobs, three kids (from a baby to a teen) and a basset hound named Spot.

The Dales have one son, Andy, 11, and a “mixed-heritage” dog named Spot.

One example of the comic strip shows a sad-looking Stanley staring in the mirror, clutching his stomach and saying, “So this is middle age.”

Another shows the Stanley parents gazing at an empty fishbowl as Mrs. Stanley says, “It doesn’t bother me that our fish is dead. It bothers me that it’s missing.”

On cooking, Jim says: “If it were my turn to cook, the question would be where I would order it from, because clearly I’m not going to cook, I’d never do anything that dangerous.”

(On cooking, the comic strip shows one child talking to the other: “My parents have a real modern marriage. They both work. Neither one cooks.”)

As the Dales talk, their words bump into and interrupt each other’s in a companionable fashion. After all, Jim, 40, says, they’ve been married “a long, long time.” They met and married when she was 19 and he was 21.

Although their greeting card business is in its 10th year, the comic strip idea really came first. “I’ve always really liked comic strips,” Barbara says. “We evolved to this kind of thinking,” Jim says.

“It was always something in our minds as something interesting to do,” Barbara, 38, says. “But then life took over,” Jim says.

And how. First, the Dales’ original suggestion for a comic strip based on Barbara’s grandfather was turned down. (Later, they were approached by the same syndicate about writing a strip, but by then, they were too busy.) And Dale wound up moving the family here from Detroit, where the Doner headquarters are located, to improve the creative product at the Baltimore office.

Then came the big moment: At dinner one night while they were vacationing in the Florida Keys, Barbara giggled and said she had a great idea for a greeting card for a new mom.

Jim scribbled the line on a cocktail napkin, applied a little creative directing and it emerged: “Congratulations, Mom! Soon your new baby will be . . . sleeping through the night. A couple of months later, rolling over. Then the baby will crawl. By 14 months, walking. Soon, talking. Then, it’s grade school . . . junior high . . . high school!! And then pretty soon after that . . . “ (open the card) “Your episiotomy will start to heal.”

They made an initial investment of $200 in 1979, and by 1981 Recycled Paper Products began to market their cards.

But all this funny business may have gotten its real start long before--when both Dales were growing up in Birmingham, Mich. Barbara, the daughter of the previous creative director for W. B. Doner, discovered early on that in her family “you could get brownie points if you said something funny.”

And Jim describes his father as “a doctor, a very funny doctor” who really wanted to be a writer. Hence, as a child Jim says he was encouraged to write.

Last year, the Dale humor crystallized again as an idea for a family comic strip. The Dales approached Universal Press Syndicate and the idea was accepted--but they told the company to wait until they saw if they could squeeze it into their schedule. “We did it as an experiment,” Dale says. The result of their experiment was six to nine months’ worth of comic strips.

Meanwhile, despite the backlog of comic strips, Barbara continues to sit and to draw at her large drafting table amid things like a huge antique Buster Brown head and old-fashioned Mickey Mouses and framed letters from people like Dr. Seuss.

They’re aiming to be “the most clipped-out and hung-on-refrigerator strip in the world,” Barbara says.