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.
Gary Larson has commented on how he accidentally writes some pretty indecipherable comics. His most famous one even has its own Wikipedia page:
“I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader.” -Gary Larson
I wonder how he got famous in the first place if his comics are hard to understand. A product of his time I suppose.
I think a couple things are in play:
- Very few people consumed these comics as we are… reading each one in sequence. You’d more likely sporadically encounter them in the funnies section of a physical newspaper. Which was a pretty hit/miss proposition to begin with. No one expected every one to be a winner, and people would routinely skip over stuff that didn’t interest them without thinking about it too hard. You’re operating under the assumption that Far Side is a classic, but at the time people would just cruise by and think “that comic is stupid, just like 60% of the other stupid comics on this page”. And folks were pretty happy to have 40% of comics be a bit funny.
- What made Far Side a classic was not its consistency. Rather, there were a few strips that became cultural phenomena. Basically a handful of hits that were breakout memes of the 80s and 90s. Colleges used to sell t-shirts of the school for the gifted strip with the kid pushing on the door that says pull, which is pretty accessible and one of those breakout hits.
- Because of those breakout hit strips, some folks got into Larson’s style of humor enough that fewer of his strips were inscrutable to them and he had a lasting market.
- Other comments point about topical references and those are also a big deal. If someone sees a beans meme with no context 30y from now, it ain’t gonna be funny. But a few weeks ago on lemmy, it was part of a contextual zeitgeist that was more or less about “these idiots will upvote anything, I’m one of the idiots… I’ll upvote this!” and it kind of captured the exuberant excitement of not knowing what lemmy was but wanting it to be something. Similarly, these strips often weren’t intended to last multiple generations. They assumed you were reading the newspaper RIGHT NOW… and so could reference current events very obliquely and still be accessible.
TLDR: Like a stupid meme, many Larson comics require shared transient context we’re missing now. Some are also just fukin weird, like cow tools. But some were very accessible and became hugely popular. These mega-star strips cemented Far Side’s popularity, and which gave Larson the autonomy to stay weird when he chose. Now we waste time trying to figure out what they meant.
Surely the most famous one is the kid trying to enter the school for the gifted, right?
That one’s easy to understand once you see the “pull” sign though.
A really large number of them are references - possibly dated references - to other things. Sometimes cultural phenomena (the movie Ishtar, which was before my time and I’m really old) but often scientific or other phenomena. In one of his books he mentioned a biology teacher who pinned a load of his comics to the wall and, week by week, the students would go “Ah, now I get that one” as they learned something about chimpanzee communication, eye spots, or whatever.
Of course, some are just whimsy. And others are warning us about those sneaky sneaky cows…
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.
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.
