This feels like a Cow Tools category of comics, where Gary Larson is tickled by the idea but nobody else really understands why.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 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
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I laughed really hard at this, but I can't really tell you why. Maybe just the absurdity of the situation?
There are layers of absurdity. It's some kind of a porcupine appreciation club, and everyone has one. And then his deflated. Do porcupines deflate? Is that a thing that happens? They have little sharp pokey bits, maybe that's something that happens. Is he embarrassed? Angry that someone might have deflated his porcupine?
Or was his a fake, inflatable porcupine? Was he pretending to have one, and why? Peer pressure? Are people with procupines so popular in this scenario that it would be worth pretending?
Or maybe he's infiltrated the group. Perhaps his cover is now blown, like his fake porcupine. Maybe he's giving everyone the side eye to see if they will attack?
Ultimately, I think the joke is us, sitting here, wondering about a deflated porcupine, trying to figure it out.
The joke, IMO, is that no matter how crazy a social norm is, violating it causes us to feel shame and embarrassment. Comedy = tragedy + time. By taking the absurdity of the social norm to an extreme, the shame is all that is left to relate to unless you also love porcupines like I do and regularly hang out with other porcupine enthusiasts.
That's absolutely why
I don't get this one at all. I like the side eye though.
I feel like its a play on a joke of somone having a balloon in a room of porcupines and suprised its popped. However, he also has a porcupine instead.