Much of Gary Larson’s comic strip The Far Side is truly timeless. With subject matter like cows, cavemen, and dinosaurs, a lot of his work feels as fresh today as it was back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the comic was being published in newspapers all over the world. But not all of The Far Side is timeless.
Occasionally, Larson would poke fun at something that was more relevant to the period he was creating them in, which is particularly true of his comic strips based on music. Larson seemed to have lots of opinions on music. Accordions and banjos, for some reason, were frequently the butt of jokes for him.
He also enjoyed disrupting the stuffiness of classical music. While he usually portrayed jazz in a flattering light, rock and pop music would sometimes be the target of his razor wit, though it might be tough to tell all these decades later. Nowadays, the musical references Larson made decades ago may require a degree of explanation.
Here are seven entirely dated Far Side comics, as well as what the heck Gary Larson was referring to. Madonna is still alive, and still making music, so most people have probably heard of “The Queen of Pop,” but she’s not quite as famous as she was back in 1992, when Gary Larson published this comic strip. The joke here refers to Madonna’s infamous cone bra, which she debuted during her “Blond Ambition” tour in 1990.
The cone bra was intended as a symbol of female empowerment and a way for Madonna to skewer her conservative critics, but for Gary Larson, the extra-pointy attire just seemed like a really bad thing to wear on an inflatable life raft. This surreal strip is referring to “Mack the Knife,” a 1928 song which originated in the musical The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. It’s about a serial killer nicknamed Mack the Knife who goes around murdering people.
Despite the gruesome subject matter, “Mack the Knife” became a hit outside of the play, recorded by a number of artists like jazz vocalists Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. The most famous version came from rock and roll artist Bobby Darin in 1959. This means that, even back in 1987, when Larson released this comic, it was already dated by nearly 30 years.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
