I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in a different time period or whether my sense of humor is just misaligned, or if it’s just that I don’t have the background necessary, but I don’t understand shit.
I don’t get any of the jokes, some are just completely undecipherable, and some comics just leave me feeling stupid as hell.
How do you guys understand any of this? What do the user demographics of this community look like?
Is this a government psyop? Are these comics evidence trails to hire super smart cryptography detectives like Cicada 3301? Are they memetic triggers for activating sleeper agents? To be honest I think I’d feel better if it was.
I don’t like his comics because every single one makes me laugh out loud, allthough several do - I like them because his imagination is weird as hell and the scenarios are rarely boring.
I think he quite often goes for being absurd and just happens to be funny, or aims to be funny and turns out being weird. Either way I don’t really mind if I don’t get the joke. Sometimes I don’t think there is one, or he was doing it at 3am and he forgot what the joke was in the morning.
(For demographics I’m 39 and have been looking at his cartoons since I was 9 or 10 onwards. So there might be some nostalgia bias)
I’m surprised so many people here don’t find many of them funny. I don’t find them hilarious or even laugh out loud funny, but most of them at least make me smile.
The Far Side comics are definitely unique.
They are, I think, intentionally enigmatic or even sometimes obtuse.
I used to read the far side collections cover to cover all the time. Absolutely loved them. Larson’s brand of wry absurdity just hits me for some reason. I can’t even explain what specifically I find funny about them. They just make me chuckle. If you don’t like them I wouldn’t spend a ton of time trying to “get” it. It is maybe just not for you.
Yeah that makes sense. Actually understanding a comic is an extra special “Aha!” moment.
I’m pretty sure they’re like Monty Python: they were of their time, and they informed the humour that followed them.
As an example: the stereotype of the middle aged woman in horn-rimmed glasses and a frumpy dress doesn’t reasonable anymore. Nor do her house parties and concerns about her neighbours. But she was basically my grandmother.
Similarly, a bunch of the animated movies featuring anthropomorphic animals in the 2000s look a lot like Far Side. The animals are doing human-like things in a human-like society.
Or, comrade, they’re activating long dormant Soviet sleeper cells.
So dated, basically. And yeah, I remember some animated movies that you speak of. I don’t remember the names, but I remember one with a bunch of chickens trying to escape their industrial chicken farm and another one that had a cow as the main character.
Chicken Run for the first one, I believe.
Yes that exactly. The animation style spooked me so I could only watch this when someone else was in the room. I’d follow them out whenever they left and continue watching only when we invariably made our way back to the room with the TV.
Barnyard for the second, with a notably transgender main character, who portrays themselves as a bull, but bulls don’t have udders
The Far Side was a huge phenomenon in the late 80s and early 90s. Many people loved it (me included).
I think weirdness is just more mainstream now, so having a daily panel of genuine strangeness in the paper was reassuring to me.
Of course, Family Circus was also popular at one point, so times do change.
They remind me of some of my lemmy posts. Either funny or misperceived and down voted.
I hate when I write something very clearly sarcastic and someone gets offended. But I guess some people just don’t like other people living in their world. They’ll come at me as if I was being racist.
#idon’tthinkClarenceThomasisblack #youcantprovemewrong
As a kid I had a farside calendar, like you rip a page off and get s new one every day - I loved it, out really taught me a lot about the world and how to live in it.
Some days you wake up and it’s a funny light hearted mood with a simple and clear point but those days are rare. Most days you wake up to a baffling and confused slice of oddness, it feels like you should be able to understand it but the more you try the more inconsistency you see and the less comfortable you feel - the day will pass and you’ll never be closer to any great understanding or comfort.
Then the next day you rip it off, throw it in the trash and get the next perplexing and obscure riddle. Life is ever thus.
I like the metaphor for life.
a huge part of the far side was the novelty of non-human life forms doing human things… bugs, plants, animals… often mundane tasks… we have since been through an entire generation entertained on the base premise of ‘absurdity’. i can imagine this simple humor being unfathomably basic, and nearly unattainable through that lens.
Are there any other single pane comics that you do find funny, or many comic strips of the 80s and 90s in general? Looking back at comics of that time, I don’t think many of them were the least bit funny and the humor from The Far Side doesn’t hit me like it used to, but when I was younger it was always the first thing I turned to when my parents got a paper. It stood out for a number of reasons; it’s concise, it’s absurd, the humor usually had a deeper meaning and it’s silly all at the same time. The other comic strips, when they were funny, had a setup and punchline, but The Far Side usually had to get by without a standard joke format. So I still think it’s funnier than every other comic of the time, but there are others nowadays that I find funnier.
I can’t think of single panel ones but I liked Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin and Hobbes is great and I think that’s what I normally looked at second, but when you look back at them, are they funny?
I think compared to the other comics in the newspaper both The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were much more humorous than the likes of Peanuts, Garfield, Dennis the Menace and especially Heathcliff (check some of those out if you get a chance, half of them are just people verbalizing what Heathcliff is doing). So maybe it’s somewhat relative.Some of them are funny, but some of them i just like because they make me think. I think Calvin and Hobbes was also relatable because everyone’s been a child once, and witnessed their parents antics as children.
? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single panel Calvin and Hobbes.
The Family Circus was frequently single panel, but they also had multi panel comics
If you want a bigger challenge, dig up the failed TV series!
I’m glad it’s not just me. Like some are decently obvious and fairly funny. Some are tongue-in-cheek and some are like anti-jokes but lots of them just don’t register as any amount of funny to me. I’m 35 years old and I have no trouble with humor from people young and old. I consider myself to have a very good sense of humor, but Far Side comics are just weird sometimes. Like I swear the author is “it was funnier in my head” personified
I used to view these comics on thin sheets of folded paper.
Gary used a “sophisticated” humor. Sometimes you could get it immediately, like when comparing what dogs and humans understand when both species are talking to each other. Sometimes it was more of a puzzle, where the clues were in the panel and it would bring a smile to your face when you solved it and understood the humor. I think the majority of them were this later form. To me, I always liked them.
It took more to appreciate the humor but compared with the other strips that were in the paper, you were rewarded by “getting it.” Sometimes the humor was built upon characters introduced in other panels which rewarded loyalty. There was usually humor on its own, but being familiar with The Far Side Universe brought another level.
Yeah a lot of the other comics at the time were really just telling the same ‘joke’ over and over. Garfield: Mondays suck. Haegar: wife is ball and chain. Shoe: work sucks. Cathy: it’s hard being a woman. Family circus: I don’t know how that was even published…
Far side was always something completely different from week to week, and in that context it’s easy to see how it stood out, even if sometimes the jokes didn’t quite land.
i used to view these comics on thin sheets of folded paper.
😂
but Far Side comics are just weird sometimes.
I honestly think this is the intention a lot of the time. I don’t think the right approach is to expect a punchline in every comic (some definitely do have one though). Sometimes I think he has just thought of something absurd and weird, drawn it and put it out there.
Like one that makes me laugh is ‘The crew of the Starship Enterprise are confronted with the giant head of Zsa Zsa Gabor’. It just shows the massive face of a woman floating in space while the Star Trek crew run round panicking. I don’t even know who she is but I’m guessing old movie star/model. It’s just a completely mad situation so it makes me laugh
In original Star Trek, the crew would often come upon some random-ass shit floating in the middle of space, put it up on the view screen, and take it completely seriously – see for instance “Who Mourns for Adonais”, featuring the giant floating head of the Greek god Apollo, or “The Savage Curtain”, featuring Abraham Lincoln floating in a chair. I think the comic is just a dumb reference to that intrinsically absurd aspect of the show.
Some comics are just puzzles. Finding humour is like prying open your dogs jaws to spit out something he isn’t supposed to eat.
Some of the ones I do find funny are less comedy gold and more funny like in a “ah wife is ball-and-chain” era funny
I always thought the joke was that they are not funny, yet the audience is supposed to feel obligated to take them as humorous and feel dumb when they don’t see the humor. Basically, I’m right there with you.
I’ve saved you a seat. Up next in line for the humor segment is The extended lineage of King Solomon Vol. 4
I tend to understand them. Can you link to a problematic one?
The Battle of Gettysburg is remembered grimly. Given the dress and location, the drawing likely reflects people from that battle, before or after.
Most pictures from the time are of people appearing solum by today’s standards. I do not recall if cameras were slow, or if that was the style of the time.
The caption also indicates a quiet, dignified, situation.
These mood is then paired with a silly action. One character is giving “rabbit ears” to another. This is a jovial and silly act performed between friends. Often the one receiving the ears has no idea until after looking at the final photo, days or weeks later.
Does this help?
Yeah it does now, but I neither can or want all of them to be explained by someone else, you know? I just want to understand them outright without having to go to the effort. It’s not as fun if I have to pull out the encyclopedia and look up early photography.
They’re not really “jokes” as in laugh-out-loud. It’s more “make me roll my eyes and snicker” kinda stuff. I love TFS because it pairs uncomfortable subjects with things uncomfortable subjects “shouldn’t” be paired with.
It plays with the dichotomy if the familiar vs. the absurd. It diffuses the seriousness of a situation by inserting something absurd…as if the absurd thing is normal.
It’s an exercise in stretching your sense of the absurd.
Also kinda like that advice when you meet someone intimidating…“just think of them on the toilet”.
I think they’re better enjoyed in the newspaper, when you don’t have to see multiple and understand none like on an internet forum. That way you can just be like ‘eh, better luck next week’.
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