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7-27-23 www.thefarside.com
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 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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It's a feature! A lot of Far Side comics don't really land, tons don't make any sense to anyone, and the rest are what made it a classic. It's not necessarily you missing a joke, it's just a very weird comic.
In this panel, the two guys are surprised at how absolutely weird one of their voices sounds on a recording. Meanwhile, one of them is wearing pants with like an extra mile of fabric in the legs, and the other is wearing pants so short, they make him look like a cannonball with feet.
Its kind of topical as well. In the 80s tape recorders were just becoming a common technology and ordinary people were recording and playing back their own voices at home for the first time. The fact that our voices sound different to ourselves was something that many people were just becoming aware of.
Tape recorders were common way before the 80s.
Tape recorders were common in studios and high end home audio systems by the 70s. They were not common in the average household until the 80s. In particular, equipment that could both record and play back audio tape was expensive and uncommon in a home setting until the mid 80s.
I was a teenager in the 80s, lived in a very small town, not wealthy at all. Tape recorders were common.
Yes. In the 80s.
Yes? When this comic was made, they were common. Panasonic came out with their first compact recorder in 1967, and there was a booming business for them throughout the 70s. Lots of people had them. These compact types were probably thought of as somewhat novel in the early 70s, but were widely available by 1980. The reel to reel shown in the comic has been around a lot longer.
Take a look at the copyright date on the comic. This was right at the time when tape recording, not just playback, devices were becoming common.
I'm speaking from personal experience. In 1982, when the comic was published, tape recorders were not considered a novelty, and had been in common usage for many years. The humor in the panel derives from the stereotype of a nerd and how the stereotypical nerd is supposed to sound.
I may be dense, but to me it looks like the joke is that he's still speaking into the recorder, not hearing the output, so he's saying his non recorded voice is funny
I didn't even notice that. It's definitely one of Larson's strips that doesn't really land 😆