Hilarity, The "Postmodern," and Fucking Up To Make Things Better

First seen here, the two comics below are from when The Dayton Daily News (on two separate occasions!) accidentally swapped the Far Side and Dennis the Menace captions, due to some sort of lay out error.

You may be noting this as the first time you ever laughed at Dennis the Menace, because it is one of what the incomparable Comics Curmudgeon refers to as a "legacy" comic. Legacy comics are the ones that are still inexplicably in the newspaper because the only demographic that still purchases newspapers is extremely comforted by familiarity and forms of bland entertainment in which they;re guaranteed to never be challenged or see a black person. But the people writing these legacy comics long ago gave up (often literally, as they don't actually do any of the production work anymore) and just started recycling the same 3 punchlines over and over.

This screw up, though, reminded me of two other legacy comics reclamation projects. Namely, the Nietzsche Family Circus and Garfield Minus Garfield. Both of these comics are pretty much exactly what the name implies (a Family Circus panel with the caption replaced by a Nietzsche quote and a Garfield comic with Garfield's visage and dialogue erased, respectively), but they vastly improve on their source material.

Someone much smarter and/or pretentious than me could explain how this is some sort of postmodern reclamation of stale cultural artifacts, being co-opted by a jaded generation...something, something. A much simpler way to put it is that stupid shit is a lot funnier when it's no longer stupid. And since Dennis the Menace, the Family Circus, and (present day) Garfield* are all pretty much the epitome of stupid, there's not much anywhere to go but up...

*While present day Garfield is clearly just Jim Davis collecting a large paycheck while I assume a team of flunkies is actually responsible for churning out the content, I will defend old-school Garfield to death. It was actually once an interesting, funny, and occasionally darkly brilliant strip. For proof, I point you to this series from late October 1989 in which it's hinted the entire run of the comic is actually just the fevered dreams of an abandoned Garfield starving to death in an empty house. Let's see Get Fuzzy pull off that shit.