Clearly, Jeff likes art films while Sally Forth and friends prefer "Transformers" (Chron.com)
"Edgy" typically doesn't play well on the comics page, which to our best guess is viewed these days mainly be septuagenarians trying to gum their Farina and make it through the morning to an early-aftenoon nap. And that's why we're surprised to see the progressive folks over at "Sally Forth" take things just a l-i-t-t-l-e too far and hope readers will "get" an odd reference to an obscure film director whose movies are not the stuff of box-office gold.
Lars von Trier? Really? When so many other comics can barely find a way to work in a reference to Twitter or satellite radio, we give kudos to writer Francesco Marciuliano for trying to work in an allusoin to a guy who directs really esoteric fare such as "Dogtown" and "Manderlay." We're not sure anyone's going to get it, particularly when most strips get great laughs out of characters appearing in comics that aren't their own and wandering Foreign Legion members, but, hey, y'gotta try.
We fully expect "Jeff" above to end up in a sanitarium by week's end - where he can watch Lars von Trier movies to his heart's delight while Sally and her colleagues get back to the business of keeping comic-strip readers thinking like fourteen-year-olds.
Comments
I'm not sure what a "setuagenarian" is, but if he meant septuagenarian, I'd like to point out to the writer that being in one's seventies isn't exactly tottering on the grave. My mom, born in 1937, is a big Sally Forth fan, so I asked her about this--while she wasn't familiar with Von Trier, she understood the joke just fine, and "just assumed he was one of those depressing Scandinavian directors". For what it's worth, Mom is a perfectly average, 73-year-old, middle-class mid-westerner.
Thanks, DL, for pointing out my typo. And while I wasn't trying to besmirch the hipness factor of readers in their 70s, I do think the Lars von Trier reference remains a wee bit obscure for the majority of people tuning in to "Sally" daily
These are the kinds of allusions that appear in "Frazz" constantly - that strip is so smarmy it makes me puke.
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