Five Classic Far Side Comics Demonstrating Gary Larson’s Genius

On Jan. 1, 1980, Gary Larson’s The Far Side began its legendary run, which lasted until Jan. 1, 1995. Totaling over 4,000 comic strips, The Far Side began in just one newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, and by the end it appeared in nearly 2,000 of them. More than 30 years after its conclusion, The Far Side remains incredibly popular.

Larson is a genius, and the diversity of his work proves it. The Far Side could be subtle and smart one day, then utterly stupid the next, and occasionally even surreal. Gary Larson could pull off a hilarious turn of phrase or draw a brilliant comic without any words at all. His brilliance was abundant throughout The Far Side, and here are five examples of the different ways Gary Larson showed his genius.

5 The incredibly stupid

The funniest stupid characters usually come from smart writers, just like Mike Judge and Beavis and Butt-Head. Larson often specialized in stupidity in The Far Side, featuring scientists acting like idiotic children and violent mobs assembling for the dumbest causes. On Sept. 29, 1983, Gary Larson published a comic featuring a man so dumb that he cannot figure out he is holding his spoon wrong. Only a genius could imagine someone so daft.

4 The subtle and smart

A number of Gary Larson’s comics contain references to classic literature like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Larson had a special affection for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which he referenced several times. The most subtle Moby Dick reference came in a comic from Aug. 21, 1980, where Captain Ahab sits at a bar with a whale activist who says, “Oh, sure — white whales. … We’ve got plenty of them.”

The cartoon requires the reader to have at least a basic knowledge of Moby Dick, including what Captain Ahab looks like with his harpoon and peg leg, alongside his obsession with finding a white whale. That assumes the reader even catches on that the panel is about Moby Dick at all, since many installments of The Far Side went over people’s heads.

3 The strange and surreal

The third example also requires prior knowledge, specifically of the song “Mack the Knife,” which was a big hit in the 1950s for rock ‘n’ roll singer Bobby Darin, although it existed well before that. The strip features anthropomorphic kitchen utensils sitting in a humble apartment, with the knife and spoon playing poker while the fork plays the piano. Without knowing “Mack the Knife,” the cartoon makes no sense, and even for those who know the song, it remains deeply strange to see living silverware.

2 An ingenious turn of phrase

“Curiosity killed the cat” is a common expression, so it takes a brilliant mind to find a way to make it funny and surprising. Gary Larson achieved that with a comic featuring a police detective examining a crime scene full of dead cats. Taking the expression and exploring it in a literal way, with cats being curious in a scientific sense, demonstrates real genius.

1 No words required

Gary Larson regularly took common concepts and found ways to reimagine them. While he used funny visuals and words in previous strips, the final example requires no explanation. It depicts a dog and a human in a car with their roles reversed, as the dog drives and the man excitedly sticks his head out the window. The panel is simple, smart, and silly all at once, representing the qualities that make The Far Side creator Gary Larson a true genius.

Source: Polygon