You’ve never heard the expression, “how now, brown cow?” It used to be something people said all the time, it’s just a silly phrase meaning “how’s everything going.” He’s just playing around with the phrase “how now brown cow.”
“How now” is a phrase that goes back to Shakespeare at least. The full phrase is nothing more than a silly rhyme, which was sometimes used as a vowel sound exercise in English education.
It most certainly had nothing to do with mocking indigenous American speech patterns, and it does no one any favors to make connections like that where there are none.
Can someone explain?
It’s a reference to this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_now_brown_cow
Larson is taking the phrase out of its normal context and riffing on it in an absurdist way for laughs.
This is one of those stupid comics that has, of its own free will, randomly popped back into my head over the last 20 years.
I had started to think it wasn’t real and I’d just misremembered a Far Side comic and now boom, it’s here like an awkward Christmas gift.
Why now brown cow?
It’s simple. He was just in the moood.
Old people get this. I’m not saying if I did or not.
Ok, fine… I got it.
