The Far Side

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Hello fellow Far Side fans!

About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.

The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side

Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!

Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:

Bloom County [email protected] https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty

Calvin and Hobbes [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes

Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness

Garfield [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/garfield

The Far Side [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.

founded 1 year ago

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I understand close to none of the comics in here. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.