Fru T. Bunn

Fru T. Bunn, The Master Baker and his Gingerbread Sex Dolls is a strip in the British adult comic Viz that has appeared in many issues since 1999. His name is a re-rendering of "fruity bun" (as in Fruit bun), and in British English "fruity" describes someone who is sexually aroused; the equivalent of "horny" in American English. He has a page on Facebook.

Character

Fru (short for Frubert) is a Master Baker (a pun on the term "masturbator") who for one reason or another is unsatisfied with the sex life he has with his wife, Noreen. To this end, he bakes himself life-sized sex dolls made out of gingerbread, with currant buns or meringues in place of the breasts and donuts in place of the genitalia.

Episodes

Other gingerbread characters frequently appear in the strip, in place of actual people. For instance, Fru gets arrested for having sex with a gingerbread sex doll in someone's caravan. He then gets locked in a cell, occupied by an inmate who turns out to be a gingerbread man with an extremely large chocolate éclair for a penis, and it is implied that Fru is anally raped by the inmate. The February 2005 issue shows him being arrested by gingerbread policemen for statutory rape on a gingerbread serving girl he made, and being led to a gingerbread police van in front of a gingerbread lynch mob.

Where exactly the extra gingerbread characters come from is never elaborated on, it is conceivable that they are all baked by Fru T. Bunn himself, i.e. he actually produces the gingerbread policemen, bouncers, pimps and paparazzi, and ingeniously puts them out ready to later "catch him in the act". It's left to the reader to decide whether Fru has some sort of extremely complex and highly adept dissassociative personality, or whether the events actually take place in a world populated by gingerbread people, all of which adds to the surreal nature of the strip.

Sadly, other bakers in the comic's world are just like Fru - while on holiday, Fru notices a fellow baker on holiday with a gingerbread doll of his own. Fru follows them to the beach, where he begins masturbating over the sunbathing gingerbread doll. Unfortunately, he gets pummelled when the baker accompanying the gingerbread doll returns from swimming. Fru has also attended a swingers' party for bakers and their gingerbread wives, and gone "dogging" with other bakers. In one strip a butcher had a similar fetish, as he made a wife out of meat (who Fru later elopes with to Spain).

An episode in 2008 was based on the Mosley v News Group Newspapers Limited saga. Like Max Mosley, Fru takes part in an S&M orgy and is described as head of the fictional "Fédération Internationale de Boulangerie"; Mosley was head of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. The unwelcome publicity is in the "News of the Bakers", while the story about Mosley was published by the News of the World. Between the spankings and sex he comments that he is ".. as stiff as a basin of ostrich egg meringue mix".

Fru and Noreen have a school-age daughter, Chelsea. Initially she was fairly normal, but later became severely handicapped, being reduced to a very low mental age. Since then it has several times been implied (though never stated outright) that she walked in on Fru performing a sex act on one of his dolls, and the shock of seeing this resulted in her being left in her current (currant) state. More recent strips have retconned this, now stating that Chelsea has been handicapped since birth.

Fru T Bunn was the unanswered answer to a question in University Challenge 2009–10, hosted by Jeremy Paxman, who derided the contestants for not knowing who he was. The question can be seen on YouTube.

A portrait of Fru T Bunn by Simon Thorp can be bought off the Viz website for £600.

See also

Drunken Bakers, another baking themed strip in the same comic.