Look up Custer's Last Stand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn
Larson did a few referencing this. Basically, Custer and his cavalry were soundly defeated by the combined native tribes.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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The Far Side
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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
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Outside of US Cavalry and some Native Americans, what part of this is Little Big Horn or Custer? That link doesn't she's light on what the comic means.
They're saying "Neener Neener, you can't catch me," and from what we know about history, the Natives accepted the challenge and won. I'm not sure how else to explain it. You might not find it funny, and that's okay, but it's clearly a reference to that battle.
What we know about history - the natives won?
They won the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand, yes.
I don’t get it
I guess boomer absurdist humor is not compatible with millennial and gen z absurdist humor. I don't think there's much to read into here. There's only 3 of them but one is a horrific, unnaturally large person. If I was there, I'd show some restraint as well. I mean WTF...
Yeah, I think that's a problem with quite a few of Larson's comics. A lot of it was based on tropes and stereotypes that were more accepted at the time. I'm gen x, so I get the humor, and found it funny back then, but with hindsight some of them were questionable if not outright offensive. In this case, however, he is ridiculing the cavalry for their hubris, when they should have had a better plan against the combined native forces. Custer screwed up and died as a result. If anything, it's saying the natives were much smarter.
It's two soldiers taunting the native Americans to attack as a form of reverse psychology. The joke is the native american perspective on things: it can't be a guy right? But where did they get a hat that big?
I don't think I understand this one...