this post was submitted on 19 May 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
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 [email protected] https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
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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I - do not get this one.
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.
This, maybe?
https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-sword-of-damocles
But what's the joke?
The joke is that in Larson's world the people selling pencils on the street aren't just poor or disabled people trying to make some money, they're actually hired and employed by the pencil manufacturer.
Yup! I wouldn't have chosen the word "hustle;" it has connotations of a rip-off. I think most people were aware that there was a mark-up, but it felt more capitalist than simply giving someone a hand-out.
I wonder how much of a real niche this filled, though. Maybe you could buy a box of ten for a nickel, and one from a homeless person for a penny; but you only had to spend a penny, a single pencil would last you a couple of days, and you'd have enough left of your nickel for a cup of coffee. Plus, you were aware of the charitable aspect. Or maybe you really couldn't afford to spend a whole nickel on a box of pencils. I suspect, though, it was more the charity thing.
I also now wonder what the average mark-up was.
It's always been so hard for the psychically deaf to get ahead in this world... Getting discriminated against in job interviews, having to hustle pencils on the side of the street. All because we can't move shit with our minds or speak without our mouths.
My co-workers are always talking to each other telepathically when I'm around, laughing about their psychic in-jokes, knowing I can't hear them. It's honestly so rude. They're probably making fun of me in there, tossing mean comments in the conduit between their attuned minds 😠
Well guess what? The psychically deaf are just as good as the psychics! There's nothing they can do with their minds that we can't do with good old fashioned human muscle 😤 we deserve respect!
Man, did you just create an even worse timeline?
Sounds like something from psychonauts
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.
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”