I'm a middle-aged (or depending on your perspective, SUPER OLD) guy. I had the good fortune to work with some bright young millennials at my last job, and we sometimes talked about pop culture. I really had a hard time conveying how subversive and groundbreaking Gary Larson and David Letterman were in their time.
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.
A permanent high school memory is returning from my job at McDonald’s around midnight. Was tired but turned on David Letterman. Voices were all dubbed over in Spanish, with English subtitles. No one onscreen acted unusual. I was dying to go to bed but stayed up till the end to hear the punch line or payoff. Then the show finished without a single reference to it. I was awestruck. I’ve never heard anyone remark about this — I wonder if I imagined this or it just didn’t shock/impress people like it did me.
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
What impresses me is that you have an encyclopedic memory of comments found on relatively forgettable YouTube videos! Not being facetious here, but I have to say I’m gobsmacked.
“November 27, 1989“ “Broadcast on Repeat Monday with no pre-announcement. The original airdate was February 10, 1989.”
“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!”
Why would it be a long con of his? It's not the same comment, it's a similar comment describing the same thing - I mean in all the U.S there are lots of people who work at McDonalds, probably a good portion of those in the late 80s coming home from work watched Letterman.
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.
Yeah, in fact, it was me in the original youtube. Even I forgot I ever saw this on youtube...
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...)
I remember this episode. Figured it was just an accidental airing of the wrong version of the show. I didn't make it as far as you -- I turned it off after about 5 minutes.
Agree and I have the same issue seeing some of the value in certain contributions, especially ones that haven't been driven into my head (Louis Armstrong, Elvis, Robert Johnson for music). A similar parallel would be Lenny Bruce. He fought obscenity regulations and made a ton of things possible. He self published records to get money and his voice out there. Today, he'd have a Netflix special.
Agreed. The edge of absurdity is still funny though, the boundaries just shift over time, and new creativity finds it. I would argue that Sean Tejaratchi is one to chart such waters:
It’s sad he’s mostly devolved into pandering to right-wing memes, selling anti-SJW calendars and other stuff that’s really just beneath him, I guess to try and remain relevant or make a buck. His early zines were funny and fantastic.
>I really had a hard time conveying how subversive and groundbreaking Gary Larson and David Letterman were in their time.
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)
Dick Cavett thought of himself as a serious journalist, and he conducted himself as such.
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."
I found the madness unleashed by the "Cow tools" panel hilarious. No one got the joke and it generated so much confusion the strip made the news. Larson talks about it The Prehistory of The Far Side.
I never saw that one, and the controversy is hilarious.
"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.
(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?)
I'm extremely glad he's back. I'm sure some part of why my brain is the way it is in 2020 is due to reading old collections of Far Side cartoons as a kid. Some of them I didn't understand properly until years later, but others (like the all-time classic where the cows are in the field standing on their hind legs, until one cow yells "Car!", and they all stand on all fours until the car is past, or "when potato salad goes bad", or the "Llamas at home" one) are the kind of thing that goes straight into your little-kid psyche and stays there.
As good as Larson is, and he’s superb, his style is strongly reminiscent of B. Kliban, who predated him[1]. Kliban was funnier, often X-rated, and infinitely more transgressive. While Kliban was famous for his innocuous cat cartoons the adult material is IMHO as gut-bustingly funny as it is obscene.
I grew up on both and I wouldn’t say Kliban was funnier, rather I would say Larson was a cartoonist while Kliban was an artist. There was a tradition of single panel comics in the newspapers and Larson was a master of that; there was a very different tradition of Absurdist illustration and Kliban was a master of that.
It definitely seems like the humor is in the same vein, but what I notice is that Larson seems the better cartoonist - for example this https://www.gocomics.com/kliban/2012/03/21 strikes me as something that Larson would have improved, I haven't seen anything funnier there, but what I saw seems as funny.
I had no idea who was being talked about until I saw the reference to "Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Own Head".
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 really hope he keeps making more, given the response to these first few comics.
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.
My wife's fashion sense is put-together with a "Stilbruch." I guess I should ask her about it specifically, but I've always taken it to be fashion-punk, to "épater la bourgeoisie" by demonstrating that although it would be within one's means to match the entire ensemble, one is not so herd-bound as to actually do so. Compare sprezzatura.
As an undergrad, thanks to TeX making the dieresis readily accessible, I was fond of its use. I remember someone commenting that my writing "coördinates" with a dieresis made him want to pronounce it as if he were Inspector Clouseau.
Related to the article's form more than its topic, but "has humbly reëmerged, wanting to reëngage": I'm used to seeing "trémas" in French used for the very purpose of avoiding the usual sound made by two neighboring letters, but I didn't know it was a thing in English.
OT but as a German-speaking reader of the New Yorker this abuse of the Umlaut has been making me irrationally angry for decades. But it’s a nice reminder that if you want to, I dunno, capitalize only the word “Dog” and end every sentence in a comma, you might want to own a magazine, Dog,
The diaeresis is unrelated to the umlaut though, it's a notation borrowed from old Greek. It never quite caught on in English, but it's part of the standard orthography of many other languages.
To me, this is a classic example of a change in medium renewing a creative individual’s creative drive. Similar examples from literature are legion. From Picassos move from painting to collage (giving us Cubism), to the Beatles employing the Sitar in Norwegian Wood.
In sixth grade, my entire class was obsessed with Far Side. Our teacher actually let us tape our favorite comics in two columns onto our school desks. I still remember the one about William Tell helped me answer a test question once.
I'm a big Far Side fan, but I'm not liking the aesthetic of the new tablet medium. The shading in particular looks significantly inferior to the old water color works.
Tom Gauld [1] is one of my favourites. He is easily on the same level as Larson and Bill Watterson, in my opinion. Like Watterson he's a very gifted artist; his New Yorker covers are beautiful [2].
Among lesser-known geniuses I would nominate the Icelandic cartoonist Hugleikur Dagsson [3], The Perry Bible Fellowship [4], and Jake Like Onions [5].
Nathan Pyle / Strange Planet is great. I would say there's some The Far Side spirit in there. Not sure what to link to since Instagram doesn't allow scrolling anymore but his Twitter seems to have plenty of stuff: https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle
Toothpaste For Dinner feels like he's carrying the farside torch. prolific, albiet sometimes at the expense of sensibility http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/
The artist has stopped updating it, unfortunately, but formalsweatpants.com has a certain farside-esque charm, in my opinion. Similar story with Perry Bible Fellowship. Not for kids though.
Bloom County made something of a return when one of the running gags became reality: Trump running for President. Berkeley Breathed couldn’t stay quiet/retired then.
None of the Berke Breathed comebacks have done much for me. Outland was a flop that gradually morphed into Bloom County light, Opus never really hit and the current revival on Facebook is better but suffers from its platform and Facebook's algorithm choosing to hide it from the newsfeed most of the time.
I always liked the human characters in Bloom County more than I liked Opus and Bill so when he focused more and more on them I found myself less and less interested.
I suppose it's unreasonable to expect a given cartoonist to have more than one truly transcendent comic strip in them and how far can you a take a particular style/set of characters/setting/etc.?
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.
Space Moose[1] and the Parking Lot Is Full[2] were two early internet comic strips that smashed through that. They still hold up well to this day, at least if you like transgressive subversive humor.
That's sadly the expectation these days. It's not like a journalist finds something interesting and spends a week or two writing a piece about it. The "news" should be up immediately so everyone can find out about it as soon as possible with some easily digestable tldr style, as it happens by the minute zero content reporting that the social media brain lives for.
Before the internet devoured print, journalism segmented itself as follows:
- 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.
There are tons of sites on the Internet that are just recipes if that's what you're looking for. Likewise don't go to The New Yorker and expect things laid out as a bulleted list.
In case someone reading this doesn't know: the word "news" is literally the plural of "new". When you want to read about all the "new" things that are happening, you go and read the "news".
"Its creator, Gary Larson (no relation!), retired in 1995, after having been syndicated in more than nineteen hundred newspapers and selling more than forty million books."
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]
The New Yorker is known for its superb standards in regards to grammar, though it does tend to favor passive voice like academic circles are wont to do. This is evident here, with a focus first on Larson's work, then an introduction to his person, and given that the article's main focus is on the work and not the person, this is a logical decision.
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]
Unfortunately they have a terrible standard of spelling at the New Yorker. Every time I read one of those words with the umlaut, it causes a full parse error in my brain, to the extent that I usually have to read the entire paragraph again.
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.
Diversity is strength – yes, even in writing. If you do not like the New Yorker's long form and quirky diaeresis, then do not read it. Other people (myself included) like the occasional long read with a cup of coffee on a foggy morning, where the prose winds its way slowly to build to a satisfying crescendo only after sufficient investment from you, the reader.
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.
One of the things necessary for a free society is free critique of art as well. Even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not all art is the same quality. If you don't believe me, spend a few hours on fanfiction.net.
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.
I agree, of course free critique of art should be encouraged, and not all art is created equal, with the bookends of the quality spectrum particularly discernible.
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.
> Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary
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.
The New Yorker is particularly fussy about including commas for nonrestrictive apposition, even when there is no possibility of a restrictive interpretation. For example:
"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.
It’s also the main cause of ambiguity in lists. This can be almost completely avoided by simply using parenthesis or dashes instead of commas to set off an appositive phrase and always using an Oxford comma.
Most grammarians seem to approve the use of parenthesis or dashes that way, so I’m not sure why commas are the most popular.
I'm guessing it's because they're seen as less distracting/invasive than the others while still getting the job done. Personally, I use parentheses and em-dashes a fair bit. But I do often find myself often going back and removing a number of them when I've overdone it.
I wonder if the seemingly declining popularity of the oxford comma is related to a lack of knowledge of the use of non-restrictive appositives. Because your knowledge of the latter is what makes the use of the Oxford comma important to the classic phrase "We invited the two strippers, JFK and Stalin."
I don’t see declining usage. It’s never been AP style which you see in a lot of newspapers and press releases but not elsewhere. It’s OK with AP but mostly if it would be otherwise confusing.
It has seemed to me that the anti-Oxford comma crowd has grown in recent years. Although you questioning it makes me reconsider. It is possible social media has increased by exposure to the personal writing and opinions of people who were already against it. Like you mention, it is against the AP guide that journalists are generally taught to follow. And they are much more likely to tweet and anti-Oxford comma screed than write an article on it.
I'm at least a half-time professional writer and essentially all the writers I know are pro-Oxford comma--including ones who have to follow AP style for all or part of their day job.
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.
In 7th grade my English teacher had us each put together a book on grammar. I used "The Far Side" cartoons to illustrate all of the rules that I had learned. I wish I could link to it, but the only copy, a hard copy, is somewhere in my parents' basement or attic.
I don't find it awkward at all - it's just an apposition.
(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.)
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.