10 Funniest Far Side Comics That Just Turned 30 (Including Gary Larson's Best Wordless Comic)

Summary

• The Far Side
  ‘s best comics originally published in June 1994.
• Even in its last year,
  The Far Side
  was still releasing some of its best comics.
• Goofy wordplay and bizarre subversions of familiar archetypes mix with some of the best slapstick in comics.

It’s almost unheard of that any franchise runs for over a decade – with new entries pretty much every day – and still maintains its quality, and yet Gary Larson’s Far Side managed it. Beginning in 1980, the comic was syndicated until 1994, with Larson still sporadically posting new entries on the comic’s official website. Thanks to the quality of Larson’s work, almost every month sees one masterpiece or other celebrate a significant birthday.

Here, we’ve collected the ten funniest comics of June 1994, all of which just turned 40 years old. While there are several gems in this collection, #1 is arguably Larson’s greatest ever gag that doesn’t use any words – no caption, no dialogue, no signs or books in the panel. Don’t forget to vote in our end-of-article poll for your favorite Far Side comic published June 1994, and let us know if you agree with our first-place selection.

Tuba Players

Larson Loves Mixing Surrealism and the Old West

With only one panel to work with, Larson often uses pre-existing genres, archetypes or even characters to establish a lot of context in a short amount of time. One of his favorite themes to use for this trick is the Old West, with macho cowboys offering perfect fodder for bizarre situations such as deadly table tennis games and violent altercations with chickens.

In the case of the tuba players, Larson showcases his penchant for trading deadly weapons for far sillier gimmicks, as two legends of the Old West square up for what’s sure to be an absolutely excruciating contest of skill.

A Wishing Star

Gary Larson’s Favorite Subject Returns

Gary Larson loves scientists, considering them his default subject for Far Side jokes. It’s for this reason that so many scientists around the world love Larson right back, with tributes such as insects named in his honor (more on that later) and his joke terminology sometimes becoming actual accepted terms (like the time he accidentally coined the now-official word for the spikes on a Stegosaurus’ tail.)

Asked in a 1987 interview with
20/20
, Larson couldn’t explain why he’s so obsessed with scientists. Asked why he pokes fun at scientists when he has such reverence for their work, Larson replied,
“I just have fun with it. It’s the theme that occurs to me most frequently.”

Larson’s scientists are generally depicted as big kids messing around when they should be uncovering the secrets of the universe, but this strip deviates from that pattern, showcasing a genuinely mean-spirited scientist who is testing his hypothesis by essentially murdering his peers.

Buzzard Picnic

Far Side Has an Unexpected Obsession with Picnics

The Far Side doesn’t get enough credit for its subtle obsession with Americana – from the American schoolkid to white picket fences, Larson loves to take scenes of idealistic American life and give them a surreal or macabre twist. Indeed, the writer and artist credits this to growing up during the Cold War, when normal life was tinged with dark anticipation. In his 20/20 interview, Larson stated:

It was going from Leave It To Beaver to bomb shelters. I remember sitting in my seventh-grade English class thinking that the world was going to end during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It made you look at the world a little bit askew.

This tendency to add a dark twist to idealized imagery of American life definitely applied to picnics, with Larson often choosing the most bizarre characters – ants, buzzards and aliens – to sit around on a gingham cloth and dine al fresco.

While being hit by a rocket’s backdraft and attacked by literal army ants are both dark fates, none of Larson’s other picnic comics get as dark as the idea of what the cowboys would see if they did peek into the buzzards’ picnic basket.

[Redacted]

Giving the Title Early Would Spoil This One

In the ’80s and ’90s, newspaper comics were often catering to an incredibly wide audience, with people from all walks of life (and age groups) enjoying the funny pages. In many cases, this led to broad comedy where the gag was spelled out, and not always in a bad way. Garfield‘s Jim Davis has put his creation’s success down to the fact that wherever you are in the world, its jokes stay both clear and relatable.

However, what always made Far Side special is that it asks readers to work a little harder. Often, the joke is only apparent once the reader connects caption to image in the right way, or once they deduce what’s meant to have taken place seconds before the image they’re seeing. In this case, the reader sees the chaos immediately, but it’s only once they search for clues that they spot the “Recipes for Disaster” book laying open on the floor. Of course, as smart as the form of Larson’s strip is, all that work is still in service of some goofy wordplay.

A Short One

‘The Far Side Island’ Has Become Iconic

The Far Side‘s desert island setting is so iconic that, today, professional cartoonists refer to this kind of joke as ‘The Far Side Island.’ A tiny island, a single coconut tree, and one or two survivors are fertile ground for Larson’s endless gags, often focused on how people manage to entertain themselves (or each other) in such extreme conditions. Ultimately, the Far Side Island is perfect for getting people into petty squabbles that run counter to their incredibly dire situation.

It’s weird that after more than a decade of drawing people messing with each other on a desert island, it took until 1984 for Larson to make such a simple joke, depending on the immediately apparent fact that the island doesn’t give his characters much room to maneuver.

Tall Chickens

Larson’s Iconic Far Side Cow Gets a Weird Makeover

This strip combines two of Larson’s biggest obsessions – cows and chickens. Cows are the most famous recurring element of The Far Side, often acting as inscrutable clowns who score sneaky victories over humans. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Larson admitted that he started using cows because of their inherent tragedy, saying, “I’ve always thought the word cow was funny, and cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.”

However, Larson also uses chickens at every opportunity, often casting them in an even more tragic light. In Larson’s world, chickens exist almost exclusively to be eaten, and their lives are governed by the humans who (by Far Side logic) are essentially their jailors. Chicken vs human is a major theme of The Far Side, even though the poultry spend most of their time at a major disadvantage.

I Know Nothing

Far Side Never Forgets That Cats are Predators

Larson’s love of household pets is most often focused on dogs, generally depicted as dim-witted but good-natured friends to humanity (and dim-witted but malevolent adversaries for cats.) However, felines do get some love throughout The Far Side, with the above comic being perhaps their best use – a ‘dynamite and plunger in a domestic setting’ gag as suited to Looney Tunes as The Far Side.

You’re Lost

Larson Nails a Classic Visual Gag

Larson loves the world of bugs and insects, and many Far Side gags revolve around them applying human logic to insect problems. For our money, this is one of Larson’s best bug comics, as two honey bees struggle with the fact that in a hive made of identical hexagonal honeycombs, a map is basically useless. This is also one of the funniest comics that show Larson’s habit of giving his most unfortunate characters names, with the idea of Fred the bee getting funnier and funnier over time.

Longtime Far Side fans know that Larson’s love of insects didn’t go unrewarded, and he has multiple insect species named in his honor by entomologist fans – including strigiphilus garylarsoni – a kind of louse found exclusively on owls. In a letter shared in The Prehistory of The Far Side, the louse’s discoverer Professor Dale H. Clayton acknowledges his request to name the louse for Larson is “a somewhat dubious honor,” though one the cartoonist readily accepted.

Some Kind of Heavy, Blunt Object

Far Side’s Best Recurring Character Is Stumped

While Larson never wanted to use specific recurring characters in The Far Side (mostly so he could abuse his one-time characters without outraging readers), he did draw on a number of archetypes throughout his work, from the Woman with the Horn-Rimmed Glasses to the Nerdy Little Kid. However, easily his best recurring character is the noir detective – a humorless man in a trench coat and fedora who turns up at The Far Side‘s bizarre crime scenes along with his faithful constable, who can usually be found jotting down the details of a case in his notebook.

While the recurring detective character is only an onlooker in the bowling pin factory murder, he still gets to be present for one of Larson’s best gags, as the police force struggle to figure out what kind of weapon could possibly have been used in the crime. The gag is solid, but Larson still takes the time to slip in an extra joke with the silly advertising slogan, “Aim at the best!”, as if the pins are being sold to individual bowlers.

Penguin

Larson’s Best Wordless Comic

It’s surprising that one of The Far Side‘s best comics would come so late in its run, but this strip absolutely defines Larson’s sense of humor. The single-panel nature of The Far Side creates an impossible moment (how did the penguin not see a yellow banana peel against the snow before slipping on it?), while the framing and composition access its maximum comedic potential (Larson ‘zooms out’ as far as possible, making the physical comedy the reader just missed as stark and bizarre as possible.

It would have been incredibly easy for Larson to over-egg this comic with some kind of caption – “Now, who left this here?” – but his judgment is on point, especially in the ‘when’ of the gag (he could have drawn the penguin about to step on the banana peel or in the act of slipping, but somehow knew that setting the gag right after would be funnier.) The ‘timing,’ visual language and subject matter combine for slapstick that’s perfectly suited to its medium, with no frills to draw attention away from simple belly-laugh image that still feels definitively Far Side.

Those are the 10 funniest Far Side comics published June 1994 – let us know which of these strips you think deserves the #1 spot in our poll below, and whether you agree that the unfortunate penguin is a work of comic genius.

Source: Natalie Angier, The New York Times

• 

  The Far Side

  Summary:

  Written and drawn by Gary Larson, The Far Side is a comic strip series that ran from December 1979 to January 1995. A worldwide hit, The Far Side explores life’s surreal side and uses a mix of humans and anthropomorphic animals. As of 2020, Gary Larson decided to pick his pencil back up again and has started The Far Side up, circulating the comics on his official website.

  Writer:

  Gary Larson

  Colorist:

  Gary Larson