I - do not get this one.
The Far Side
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.
Indigents (frequently blind) selling pencils from a tin cup on the street is an old stereotype.
And these days it's young-ish people selling flowers, at least in my area.
The worn out jacket and hat show that the person is destitute. Homeless people used to commonly sell pencils on the street.
The joke is that nobody interviews to be a pencil salesman. It's not big business. It's easy to sell pencils because they are everywhere, they're dirt cheap, and everyone needs them. Well, not so much anymore, but this was 44 years ago.
i think it's that only the most desperate people would want to do something as boring as pencil sales.
I’m interpreting as this man is clearly desperate for work, I’m sure he’s not being picky here. There’s an absurdness to an employer asking “well tell me why pencil selling is your passion” as if only offering labor is not enough, an employee must be enthusiastic about their labor, regardless of how mundane it is.
And really we see this everyday at ordinary job interviews.
I guess it could be a riff off the classic sales interview question “sell me this pencil”