Gary Larson has commented on how he accidentally writes some pretty indecipherable comics. His most famous one even has its own Wikipedia page:
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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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!
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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...
We had Ishtar on VHS when I was a kid. I feel older than the wind.
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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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.
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.
This exactly. I have to scroll for a long time before I can go "Aha!" at some comic I can somewhat understand and then exit the community.
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.
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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
@InfiniteStruggle You have to read them in the voice of Steven Wright to get them.
A deadpan delivery might actually help in some of these comics.
I can levitate birds but nobody cares.
Lol, here's another.
I can time travel, but very slowly and only forwards.
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.
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If you want a bigger challenge, dig up the failed TV series!
Some of them just aren’t very good. I dunno why someone is cherry picking some of the more esoteric ones when there are volumes of better ones to choose from.
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".
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