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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[–] pikasaurX4@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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

[–] HipPriest@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] petertodd@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In original Star Trek, the crew would often come upon some random-ass shit floating in the middle of space, put it up on the view screen, and take it completely seriously -- see for instance "Who Mourns for Adonais", featuring the giant floating head of the Greek god Apollo, or "The Savage Curtain", featuring Abraham Lincoln floating in a chair. I think the comic is just a dumb reference to that intrinsically absurd aspect of the show.

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