On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can’t tell what you’re going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.

Bil Keane (1922–2011), creator of the long-running family comic strip *The Family Circus*, was frequently asked to comment on why newspaper comics remained a “safe” form of entertainment. This remark reflects a late-20th-century media landscape in which parents increasingly worried about unpredictable or adult content in broadcast TV, radio, films, and mass-market magazines. Keane’s own work was widely syndicated and deliberately gentle, built around domestic humor meant to be read by children and adults together. The quote fits his public persona as a defender of broadly wholesome, family-oriented humor and of the newspaper comics page as a curated, dependable space.

Keane contrasts the unpredictability of modern mass media with the perceived reliability of the newspaper comics page. His point is less about artistic superiority than about trust: comics, constrained by editors, syndicates, and the expectations of a general readership, tend to avoid sudden shocks in language, sexuality, or violence. Implicitly, he argues that shared family culture depends on common, accessible material—humor that can be consumed together without negotiation or screening. The quote also functions as a defense of “clean” comedy: it suggests that broad appeal and moral acceptability are not limitations but virtues, enabling comics to serve as a stable, intergenerational ritual.