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!

Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:

Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty

Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes

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

Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield

The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works

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 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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[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 88 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Gary Larson has commented on how he accidentally writes some pretty indecipherable comics. His most famous one even has its own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools

[–] InfiniteStruggle@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I wonder how he got famous in the first place if his comics are hard to understand. A product of his time I suppose.

[–] CtrlOpenAppleReset@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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