“The Far Side” Returns to a Weird World
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Their sensibilities are ubiquitous now and so if you grew up in the 2000’s it would be easy to look at them and say, what's the big deal? But at the time their absurdist humor felt rebellious, new, and important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDBZpBgBsWI
oh man. I remember coming home from my job at McDonald's (!) and this episode was playing. I was dead tired but stayed up to see how they'd finally stop the subtitling thing. They never did -- the kept it up throughout the show and never made a single mention of it. That made it 10x more hilarious. Wonder when this aired? must have been 1989 or 1990ish
Well, at least my story was consistent -- like that line from Glengarry, Glen Ross, "tell them the truth, it's the easiest thing to remember"
Yeah, I don't know why this episode made an indelible memory for me, but it sure did.
Although your idea is cooler :)
“Was it overdubbed on the original airing?”
“No.”
and see all Pike Bishop comments: “as a native Spanish speaker from Chile, I must say this is priceless stuff! This was dubbed in Mexico. I contribute to a website that identifies and lists the voice actors of Spanish dubs made for Latin America, so I know several of the voices in this video; in fact, I grew up listening to them, along with millions of other people!”
The comment is of course on a video showing exactly what was described, Letterman dubbed into Spanish with subtitles.
on edit: Or even better it's the same person making a similar comment on two different platforms many years apart on the same subject? Still not seeing the long con aspect under those conditions.
But you're right -- 1989 summer job.... 3 network channels + some UHF channels. I doubt I was the only burger flipper sitting there thinking, "huh?" at midnight.
Millennials will never appreciate how edgy Far Side, Letterman, Howard Stern, etc. were to that era. Of course, I'll never appreciate most of the nonsense my teen son watches on youtube now either. (he even thought 'Heat' was a lame movie...)
https://liartownusa.tumblr.com/
...whom, incidentally was also (somewhat) recently profiled in the New Yoker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-brilliant-...
I don't know. Knowing French and Italian comic strips from the 70s, but also underground US stuff like the Freak Brothers, Crumb et al, I can hardly imagine Gary Larson being "groundbreaking".
And watching some older US hosts, like Dick Cavett, I find them much better than David Letterman (or anybody there today)
Letterman was foremost an entertainer (as was Carson). But he also (credibly) acted the part of cultural critic. Letterman laid some of the groundwork that John Stewart ultimately perfected.
And, as a sibling comment notes, Letterman had widespread (mainstream) reach. Much more so than any of the other fine examples that you cited.
It is only appropriate to close this comment by quoting Letterman himself - "if you accept the premise, you'll enjoy the show."
People have issues with the latter, where breaking new ground turns into milking previous success.
"Larson took the unusual step of issuing a press release, explaining the joke and apologizing for the confusion caused:
The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness. While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown in this cartoon. I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader.
Larson further explained that he was inspired by the idea that tool use was the characteristic that separated mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom."
"Reflecting on the cartoon's reception, Larson suggested he had erred in making one of the tools resemble a saw, which misled many readers into believing that to understand the cartoon's message, they needed to decipher the identities of the other three tools."
and that mirrored exactly my train of thought looking at the cartoon.
Twenty-first century Cow Tools are more sophisticated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWiEp10ruA
(I would be more convinced with less CG, but they do have a full channel. Maybe the brains behind this could come up with a similar system to allow humans to give up their personal data and social graph, voluntarily and in a low-stress environment?)
Edit: less CG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXUUTz6sHhU
This one on the other hand, might be oddly prescient in hindsight: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/423056958717553865/
* "Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm. ... Yes, curiosity killed these cats."
As a kid in the 70s/80s, my Dad had a bunch of those books. I still remember some of them too - like the man sitting across a restaurant table from a human sized blowfly saying to the waiter "... and some shit for my fly".
I suppose you had to be there. I still much preferred The Far Side though.
I grew up reading the Far Side in the newspaper every day. I remember the excitement of running out to get the paper to grab the comics before anyone else.
Today I follow some comics on Instagram, which gives that same sort of excitement. I load up Instagram and among the pictures of my friends are some comics that I enjoy -- including one account that I'm sure is not legal but posts a Calvin and Hobbes comic every day.
I'm not sure if I should feel bad following the account knowing it is probably being done without permission, but at the same time, it brings me daily joy, which is what Bill Watterson always said he wanted to do.
Maybe it won't affect any given transaction.
But concern over the source of the products we consume is responsible and worth thinking about.
Gotta get a good shot in at those dastardly Republicans I guess.
Also gone were Bloom County with the banana jr 6000 self-portable computer (looking like a macintosh with legs) and Monty Python.
That said, we got futurama, xkcd and ... others?
Anyone want to share some good sources humor (that aren't too dumbed-down?)
Among lesser-known geniuses I would nominate the Icelandic cartoonist Hugleikur Dagsson [3], The Perry Bible Fellowship [4], and Jake Like Onions [5].
[2] https://www.heartagency.com/artists/tom-gauld/
Trudeau may have done the best job with Doonesbury by aging the characters.
Something like xkcd stays pretty fresh too because it has such a wide range.
> On the comics page, “Calvin and Hobbes” and “Bloom County” shared Larson’s wild playfulness;
It abstracted higher than comics around it.
But internet humour like all the internet has iterated and abstracted many times since.
I think nostalgia will keep it going, but it's had it's day.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020205062518/http://spacemoose...
- daily newspapers, which rushed important news into print as fast as possible (multiple daily editions, “hold the presses”)
- weekly news magazines, which focused on analysis of anything broadly newsworthy.
- monthly special interest magazines which combined narrow focus with in-depth coverage (Foreign Affairs, Byte)
Broadcast journalism largely copied the format - daily news (Walter Cronkite) and weekly analysis (60 Minutes, Face the Nation).
The dominant low brow weekly print news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report) refused to change formats are are gone. The middle & high brow weekly magazines survived Slate and Salon just fine; we shall see what the likes of Vox and The Intercept and Pro Publica mean for their fate.
The Newyorker clearly cares a bit about grammar: "its" for ownership - no apostrophe. Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary. There are multiple firing solutions here. You could go in with something like:
"Gary Larson (no relation!) retired in 1995. He was ... etc ...
I'm not asking for a return to the strictures of "Usage and Abusage" but I'd like to think that professional journalists are able to stick words on the page without them looking uncomfortable.
Prose should flow. When you write it, why not read it back to yourself.
[Cow holding a bow, wearing a 10 gallon hat and saying something unlikely to Rowland. Rowland is a chicken]
You have just used what would have been a useful opportunity to discuss Gary Larson's unique art style to insist how much more you, a Hacker News commenter, knows about prose than someone employed by the New Yorker.
Further, due to your comment's lack of clarification, I ironically cannot tell if you are insinuating that the author of the article used "its" correctly or incorrectly. For the record, because this possessive pronoun is referring to Gary Larson's work in the previous sentence, the usage is correct. [1]
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive#Pronouns
Seriously, if you're not happy with "cooperate", spell it as "co-operate". This is an old standard, and it still works well. I don't get how the New Yorker tries to pretend they're the magazine of high society while spelling like Spın̈al Tap. The point of language is to have common understanding, and you can't do that if you're the only one using your weird spelling.
(Also, I wish they just got the the point in their articles. At least give a summary of why I would want to read the whole long form article before launching into some anecdote about two people meeting at a bar.)
> She said that once, in the elevator, [the editor] told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
So, be careful whose weird house style you criticise, is the message.
I personally do not like Hemingway's skeletal, scientific style – it feels to me like the writing of someone who does not revel in the pleasure of writing. However, I recognize that's a personal preference, and under no circumstances would I embark on a crusade to have fewer people read him or suggest that Hemingway do something different to satisfy me.
Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because I come from a country that would forcefully insist on designated styles of art - Soviet realism is the only acceptable art style, Pravda has the official and only acceptable journalism. It's wrong.
I tried with the New Yorker. I subscribed last year, and it got to the point that no one in the house wanted to read it. We'd look at the cartoons, apply the universal captions to them ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10262979 ), but articles felt like chores. That's nothing against long form journalism, just that they don't try to make their articles accessible.
It's like going to movies without a seeing a preview or knowing the genre. Sometimes that works really well, but if you get 15 minutes in and start wondering why you should care about any of these people, it's time to move on. It's great that this never happened to you.
But it just so happened that their house style causes my text parser to fail all the way up the stack. My fast english reader throws an exception, and asks my foreign word region of the brain to see if it has a match. Heuristics say it's English, English says it's not a word, which then throws an exception that bubbles up to my top level of consciousness to decide what it means. It takes all of five seconds, but in the process it interrupts the flow of reading. Which gives the conscious mind time to ponder -- why am I reading this anyway? The answer too often came back negative.
Nothing wrong with you liking the magazine, or other people. But to me, the diaereses are the Jar Jar Binks of the New Yorker -- something designed to take me out of the action because the writer couldn't kill his darlings. And I don't think it's wrong to complain about specific aspects of art that make it unenjoyable.
But the reason people keep down-voting you is because those kinds of meta-discussions have a time and place. No, I'm not trying to erode someone's freedom to speak their mind whenever they would like - it's just talking about anything outside of scope is counterproductive and wastes everyone's time (not to mention that some people you could have rallied to your cause are going to be displeased enough by the conduct to not ever become an ally). A post on Hacker News titled "Why The New Yorker has those funny dots above some letters" is a great place for this kind of discussion. Or a post about orthography. Or even "What can print publications do to stay relevant in the age of the Internet?" (New Yorker's answer: bold, archaic choices in style. Your answer - wrong decisions! You have had it with their nonsense!)
But discussing the same topics under a post that celebrates a particular artist's work (and the host of that article just happens to be The New Yorker) tends to be unwelcome, and for good reason. It's like attending a Chemistry 101 lecture and then, when the professor finishes explaining the first five shapes of atomic orbitals, raising one's hand to say "Well, first off, the problems with this university are..." People are going to be irritated.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c4/ad/81/c4ad811c149c46a576bef2554...
https://bookriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/it-just-says...
That's not awkward at all. The comma separates "Gary Larson (no relation!)", a subordinate clause, from the main clause: "Its creator retired in 1995 […]".
Edit: As jcfields so kindly pointed out, it's apposition. Specifically, it's the use of a restrictive appositive.
To my eyes, the real awkward comma is the one after '1995'. However, The New Yorker is known to have its own, fairly specific punctuation style.
"When he died, in 2004, his books and exhibitions were too numerous to count, and his magazine work had been published all over the world in the best publications." [0]
The copyeditors seem to think that writing "When he died in 2004" would imply that he had died not only in 2004 but also in another year.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/when-in-berlin...
Most grammarians seem to approve the use of parenthesis or dashes that way, so I’m not sure why commas are the most popular.
And, again, to clarify AP a bit. AP doesn't say you can't use an Oxford comma but that you should only use it if the sentence could otherwise be misconstrued, e.g. the "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin" that Oxford comma fans like to cite.
(Admittedly also reversing the clauses makes for a complicated sentence structure. Depending on the level of literacy of the target audience, it might not be appropriate.)
But you're still right. That sentence is clunky with all the commas, and your revision is an improvement.