this post was submitted on 05 Aug 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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Can you explain the joke to me?
They seem to be rich, harder to have the blues.
Ha, definitely not rich, but I am a privileged white dude who adores old country blues and other related genres. Although I genuinely think early blues and jazz musicians are absolute geniuses, it has always felt a little incongruous with my own lived experience. Good to be reminded not to fetishize or romanticize things too much. I don't know if any of that made sense. The cartoon says it much better.
I think that makes sense, and every music style has a sense of culture that is a bit hard to break into. Let's just say it's not common for rappers to come from wealthy or suburban backgrounds. It would be pretty weird if a country musician came right out of Boston for example, it would be hard for them to break into that.
I feel like every genre has some culture around it, and with that culture always comes some gate keeping. I mean go bring your middle aged ass to a new age punk band, and see how comfortable you feel there... but with that gatekeeping also comes a sense of community that gives that music a special home to those people.
I also think the gatekeeping also makes music discovery extra exciting. It feels like you're breaking into somewhere foreign when you branch out, specifically because of that new subset of culture.
Well put. You really hit on something at the end there. Shared culture and community. What I admire as much as anything about blues, jazz, hip-hop for that matter, is how people in extremely repressive circumstances were able to create culture and meaning in spite of it. And yet, although I admire that strength of human spirit immensely, I can never fully be a part of it. My role is to recognize instead how I have been part of the system that created the oppression.
As a non native english speaker, what does "have the blues" mean?
The general phrase is pretty well described by Elton John/Bernie Taupin's song... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6KYAVn8ons
He puts emphasis on how "things can only get better", being at the bottom of life. Separated from long-term desires.
"In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues, which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates."
Lol. I’ll try, as a white, affluent, middle-aged male. I’ll volunteer “having the blues” means “feeling sad/hopeless from life’s many relentless challenges”
To be sad.
It's referring to this ancient American tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Man_Group?wprov=sfla1
Just joking. What the others said is correct. It means to be sad, depressed, down.