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.
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…
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.
