please dont tell me this is NEW? if so i dont like it
Copyright on the side of 1982 suggests it is not but I don’t know for sure. That said, I don’t get it
They are stereotypical nerds, and therefore have stereotypical nerd voices. Think Urkel or Professor Frink. Most people find the sound of their own recorded voice to be weird. In this case, the humor is that he actually has a weird voice. I think the humor in this one hit better 40 years ago. Also, a lot of Far Side humor isn’t haha funny, but more like, “Wut?”
It’s a feature! A lot of Far Side comics don’t really land, tons don’t make any sense to anyone, and the rest are what made it a classic. It’s not necessarily you missing a joke, it’s just a very weird comic.
In this panel, the two guys are surprised at how absolutely weird one of their voices sounds on a recording. Meanwhile, one of them is wearing pants with like an extra mile of fabric in the legs, and the other is wearing pants so short, they make him look like a cannonball with feet.
Its kind of topical as well. In the 80s tape recorders were just becoming a common technology and ordinary people were recording and playing back their own voices at home for the first time. The fact that our voices sound different to ourselves was something that many people were just becoming aware of.
Tape recorders were common way before the 80s.
Tape recorders were common in studios and high end home audio systems by the 70s. They were not common in the average household until the 80s. In particular, equipment that could both record and play back audio tape was expensive and uncommon in a home setting until the mid 80s.
I was a teenager in the 80s, lived in a very small town, not wealthy at all. Tape recorders were common.
Yes. In the 80s.