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’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.
😂
Some comics are just puzzles. Finding humour is like prying open your dogs jaws to spit out something he isn’t supposed to eat.
Some of the ones I do find funny are less comedy gold and more funny like in a “ah wife is ball-and-chain” era funny
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
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.