I have the Complete Far Side collection, and one day my brother-in-law was reading through it and made an excellent observation: many are basically memes, but from an era before everyone had a camera or the ability to edit images. Larsen took ordinary dialog and used cartoons to pull it out of context and make it hilarious. Memes take ordinary pictures and use text to pull it hilariously out of context.
I was a boy! And when i watched all these cartoons, i was very aware of the " background " images...they clearly stood out ,,exaggerated angles or depth,,,chairs,tables that were drawn just a little,,off..and not symmetrical,,,,yeah,,they stood out to me aswell....,,but since i was a boy,i didnt ponder the images i was seeing,,,but i was aware of how they caught my eye...
I'm 72 and my four sons are all in their 30's and to this day if any combination of the five of us pushes when it's pull , or vice versa , some one ,or all , says 'School for the gifted' .
I remember a very familiar scene from the Sopranos when Tony and 2 friends show up at night to one of the friends home late and his mother gets up and cooks for them and eats with them. I'm thinking maybe that scene was a tribute?
Ultimately, Larson respected his audience to understand the joke without spelling it out. When that happens, we feel as if we’re part of the joke; like we’re in on the joke.
Those Italians with their sauces. You’d think the rest of us don’t know how to feed ourselves. No wonder us Irish had to get out of NY. We had a constant pain in our ears listening to those Italians going on about sauces all day.
Great video - subscribed. I was first exposed to the Far Side by my high school math teacher, who would occasionally break out the projector (this was the '90s) and show transparencies he'd made of his favorites.... Later on I had a tee with the image from 9:14 on it. Loved that shirt, and still love the Far Side.
I always recall the frame where a feeding mosquito is stiff and straight like an over-pressurized fire hose, with her body resembling a rubber hot water bottle in the near-terminal balloon condition, with only her tiny little ineffective wings not yet inflated, while a nearby mosquito (perhaps her devoted husband) shouts in alarm: Pull up! Pull up! You've hit an artery!
kind of wished they kept the eyes i think they improved the painting its exactly the sort of thing i think a lot of art enthusiasts would think made it more valuable and unique
I had to send this around. Beautiful, distilled shot of pure meta information. Brilliant and necessary. Like watching fire. Instantaneous subscriber. More please..
I am a big fan of Gary Larson. I recommend you check out the artist Norman Rockwell, who created the cover art for 323 issues of The Saturday Evening Post magazine between 1916 and 1963. Each weekly oil-on-canvas painting told a story in exquisite detail. There were no words other than the titles. The stories were often, but not always, humorous. I would bet that Gary Larson's family had copies of The Saturday Evening Post on their living room coffee table when he was growing up. Search Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post.
Regarding strip comics having several panels to tell a joke, you say "Larson can't. He has to condense time into one panel...". You disprove yourself at 5:31.
Thank you for sharing. I am a big fan, alas disillusioned by recent censorship on many of these brilliant cartoons. Never ever change the past!! Only add disclaimers when desired.
When I was a kid watching cartoons in the 60's I didn't notice certain details like I did after I turned 65. I noticed that in some scenes in houses, some of the pictures hanging on the wall had nude women in them. The nudes were usually seen in chase scenes where the painting is only seen for a brief moment as the characters go by it. I don't know how they got this by the censors, but it's quite obvious that most viewers didn't see it either. I just happened to pause a cartoon one day for some reason and just as I hit play again I saw it. I stopped it, backed up and there it was, plainly visible, but only for a split second! Those artist were some dirty old men!
Looney Tunes cartoons are timeless. I bet I could watch them now in my 50's and they would still be as enjoyable and funny as when I watched them for the first time way back in the early 70's. I always noticed the wonderful backgrounds in these cartoons as a young kid because they looked so vibrant and interesting.
