The Chickens Are Restless

This book, one of the many collections of The Far Side cartoons that lay so ubiquitous around my family's home that they are outnumbered on the bookshelves there only by John Grisham novels, Beano annuals and books on childcare, is, like all other collections of Gary Larson's superb comic, amusing and bizarre.

   I've moved back into the Stovell family home for the week surrounding Christmas, which is very generous of my parents (even though they did convert my bedroom into some sort of waiting lounge in my absence), and has the added benefits of free food and warmth, pushing my negligible budget that extra bit further until student loans come back in. I jest, material security is but an extra gratefulness; I love my family. Even the new dog, though she may never live up to the standards set by the brilliantly useless mongrel preceding her.

   Anyway, I hadn't unpacked yet and everyone was busy, so the first hour or so after getting home and making a brew I spent perusing this collection of comic strips. This blog is for any book I read, after all, not just the intellectual or deliberately interesting ones that I ostentatiously purchase and progress through.

   For those of you who don't know The Far Side, it's hilarious. A single-panel newpaper comic that ran from 1980 to 1995, it never fails to be weird. Comics are hard to discuss without dumping loads of links to examples them; the pictures and words are inseparable in most of the jokes, so I'll try to explain what characterises them. Mad existential retorts and logical fallacies, anthropomorphism and civilisation run amok, childishness and maturity blended together in the pits of half-recognisable awkwardness, the familiar and common turned inside-out and upside-down and still comprehensible enough to provoke a chuckle - these are the styles Gary Larson uses in his distinctive style of surreal comedy. The content of each strip is thoroughly unpredictable, even within this short collection of (still very random) ones, and there are no recurring characters, though regularly featured are overweight suburban humans, insects, nerds, monkeys, men trapped on desert islands, farmers, aliens, fish, dogs, scientists (including mad ones), exotic wildlife, amoebas, hunters, farm animals (yep, including chickens), and a plethora of others that I cannot possibly hope to list. Each strip is as unexpected and yet as similar as every other; the main thing you can rely upon The Far Side to do upon reading is a brief moment of uncomprehension followed by a strange lateral click when you notice a particular choice of word or frame of situation or detail of image that propels the whole comic into something so utterly odd (and occasionally genuinely witty) that you cannot help but laugh. This of course goes for the comic as a whole, and so if surreal humour does tickle your fancy and you weren't already aware of this comic, simply googling it will yield thousands of strips online, and collections of them such as this one are almost always to be found in the discount cheap section of comedy shelves in second-hand shops.

   Anyway, it's mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve and here I am talking to a handful of future strangers on the internet about a weird comic I've just read. I'm going to go get a refill of tea and see if my brothers want a Mariokart tournament. Merry tomorrow, dear whoever.