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.
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.
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.
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.