I understand close to none of the comics in here.
I understand close to none of the comics in here.
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.
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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
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.
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.
/thread
Thanks. I understand this a little better now. As for other comics, I've read Calvin and Hobbes and have no problem reading them cover to cover. And the comparison to memes make this whole thing make a lot more sense - we weren't there for it, so it makes little sense, but they might still have been funny in its time like Markiplier farquad saying "E" was (for a few weeks some time ago) for us.
When I was young, I used to have a t-shirt of the comic where a dog is trying to lure a cat into a dryer with a sign that says "CAT FUD". I mostly encountered his comics in a similar way. In bookstores, posters, etc. I didn't even know the name of it at the time. So I agree it felt like a cultural thing back then to me.
The absurdity of cow tools makes it pretty funny if you have no idea what the reasoning behind it is. A lot of the comics are just absurdist humor too, so the funny is that the situation is absurd.
I have his whole anthology from the 90s. Two massive books. He was the first one to do a single panel comic. There is almost always at least double meanings If not triple so you have to know the common phrases or slang that's being referred to. One in the oven? Pregnant, but for a witch, it's Hanse and Grettle cooking children. The party and the bananas? Who is Tarzan going to invite to a dinner party? So after they host a party it's bananas everywhere. Instead of typical dinner party cleanup. You got one comic a day and sometimes you have to look and think and others were obvious. If it alludes to something and you don't know the reference, then you're lost. The chickens, cows and dogs were all recurring themes. I still absolutely die laughing at the boneless chicken ranch one. Probably my favorite. https://www.cardcow.com/911282/boneless-chicken-ranch-gary-larson-far-side/
Yeah boneless chicken ranch is pretty funny.