All 4 of those strips are astoundingly funny to me. (I’m a big fan)
this one is my favorite:
The tornado panel is brilliant. I’m not sure I understand the Stradivarius one.
Today, Stradivarii are extremely expensive collectors’ items, sought out by the finest professional musicians. In the cartoon, he is a small-town carpenter, peddling cheap fiddles to any parent who has a child trying to learn.
I prefer to think he is peddling fine violins but is forced by the marketplace to promote his business in this undignified manner.
My first thought was that, given the taped on sign and his staring-at-the-street stance that he was having trouble selling them at all.
My guess is that Larson passed by a musical instrument store which was advertising much like that and considered how funny it would be if Antonio Stradivari was forced to advertise the same way. Today, one of his instruments might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to a collector.
The guy in the panel is Jack Stradivarius, Antonio’s cousin and the lesser success of the family business.
They can go for a tad more than hundreds of thousands:
The Messiah Antonio Stradivari - $20 million
The Lady Blunt Antonio Stradivari - 15.9 million
The ‘Da Vinci’ Ex-Seidel Antonio Stradivari - 15.3 million
Sure, “hundreds of thousands” is the low end of the price scale, if you are talking about an actual Stradivari instrument made by Antonio. He also made cellos, violas, and a small handful of other stringed instruments.
I also saw that a decade ago someone tried to sell one of his violas in an auction on Sotheby’s with a starting price of $45M, but nobody was willing to go that high.
Isn’t that what we are talking about? And you said might cost, to me that indicates the high end.
Sorry, I meant that’s how much you might expect to have to spend if you wanted one today, which is funny if you’re getting something to teach your kid how to play.
All good.
Sometimes I so not good write when type.
This is the definitive answer. Well done, @Cheesesteak.
But really, it has to do with your appreciation for cartoon violence. If this had happened in the real world, it would of course be mean and cruel and not funny. Why/when/whether cartoon violence is funny is a question that may be too philosophically deep for the current thread.
I just want to say that I have never seen a Far Side cartoon that went too far.
In the classic toons tho they usually punched up, not down, as is the case here. Yeah that can and has been subverted (see Itchy and Scratchy), but as an animal lover this one didn’t really do it for me. Larson has had many pet strips which play that straight of course.
???
OHHhh, Jefferson Davis! This being a thread about comic strips, my brain first went to Garfield creator Jim Davis.
Which struck me as appealing.
Talk about misdirection! I stared at the catapult cartoon for at least ten seconds, trying to figure out what was funny, before I noticed the guy in the upper left corner!
One of the fun things about that (to me) is that there’s actually a brand of hot dogs I’ve seen named FUD.