What's so funny? Did it use to be common to tell your name to strangers who just called you?
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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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
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Yes, "Hello, name speaking" used to be very common when I grew up
That only made sense for the caller to say, and only before Caller ID got widespread. It may be polite but if somebody called you and asked for your name, would you have given it?
Anyway, what is supposed to be funny about the comic?
Not at all, it was a formality to say your name, especially on landline where multiple people have access to the same phone.
This comic is from 1993. So before everyone had cell phones and you were actually calling places instead of people. Probably actually manually dialing all the numbers, too. So you'd dial number, hope you did it right, and you didn't actually know who would pick up if multiple people were at the place you called.
I think this is why I was taught the polite way to answer the phone was: "Hello. Smith residence, John speaking. May I ask who's calling?" Besides, most of the time, the person on the other end was someone somebody there actually knew. It wasn't a goal to try to keep information away from the caller.
The joke is on the phrase "talked with God." It's kind of a common phrase and usually used in a metaphorical/spiritual way rather than actually speaking to him. It's not that deep of a joke. Far side usually isn't.
It's also absurd that God has a landline.
I suspect His service was cloud-based.
if somebody called you and asked for your name, would you have given it?
It was polite to answer a phone by saying "X residence, Y speaking" or "[businessname], good day". Picking up the phone and going "hello?" without saying the "identifier" of the phone you're picking up was utterly rude back in landline times.