My turn to say it: i don’t get it.
this post was submitted on 10 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
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!
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In 90s and earlier American slang, a "dud" is a failure, which was often applied to movies, books, and yes daily comic strips.
An entertainer who never failed to make a good movie, TV show, comic strip, would be said to "never make a dud".
This was in reference to ammunition that failed to explode, a big thing given American prominence in arms and ammunition manufacturing, that permeated through the culture.
In this drawing, the workers are literally making bombs, some of which could not explode and turn out to be duds.
See but now is it implying he's actually a Mr. Perfect or that he's someone who pretends insistently to be Mr. Perfect? Because if they are building nukes, how often are they actually testing for duds? Is this implying he never makes a dud and everyone where everyone else sometimes does, or that he pretends to never make a dud when realistically nobody will never know until the warheads start flying and it becomes a drop in the pool?
I choose to believe it's the latter, that he "takes pride in making the best bombs, with no duds" whereas the disgruntled colleague understands that everyone is expected to never make a dud and that such a boastful claim is baseless since nobody will be able to prove it until Armageddon.
I’m familiar with “dud” in both contexts. Just never heard “never make a dud” as an expression.
I think:
Being good at your job is a moral good in boomer culture. But being good at making bombs subverts it (maybe?)
It's just that it's not really that funny or interesting.
I believe they hate him because he's perfect, which is ironic since at at a bomb factory, you particularly don't want duds.
Well alright that seems reasonable.
I was thinking some sort of expression where it was common to say “never makes a dud” made literal since it’s a bomb factory. All I could find along those lines is a reference to a shampoo brand (“Huron”).
Either that or some kind of commentary about how bombs suck and a “successful” bomb is a terrible thing so they hate him for always making a successful killing machine. But that doesn’t seem in line with the Far Side oeuvre.
Usually Gary’s comics need to be enjoyed through the lens of boomer absurdism.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, there’s literally just no deeper joke than “guy working at bomb factory never makes an error”
That would be a better caption 😂