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, but his success isn’t the only evidence of that; it’s also the diversity of his work. The Far Side could be subtle and smart one day, then utterly stupid the next — it was occasionally even surreal. 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 such examples of all the different ways Gary Larson showed his genius.
5
The incredibly stupid
The funniest “stupid” characters usually come from really smart writers (just look at Mike Judge and Beavis and Butt-Head). Larson often specialized in stupidity in The Far Side, with scientists acting like idiotic children and violent mobs assembling for the dumbest of causes. On Sept. 29, 1983, Larson published this comic, featuring a man so dumb that he can’t figure out he’s holding his spoon wrong. Only a genius could imagine someone so daft.
4
The subtle and smart
A number of Larson’s comics contain references to classic literature like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, though it seems Larson had a special affection for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which he referenced several times. The most subtle Moby Dick reference came in this comic from Aug. 21, 1980, where Captain Ahab is sitting at the bar with a whale activist, and the activist says, “Oh, sure — white whales. … We’ve got plenty of them.”
This comic 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 — and his obsession with finding a white whale. That assumes the reader even catches on that this is about Moby Dick at all, as it’s entirely possible that this comic, and many other installments of The Far Side, went over people’s heads.
3
The strange and surreal
This comic also requires some knowledge going in, 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. It features anthropomorphic kitchen utensils sitting around in their humble apartment, with the knife and spoon playing poker and the fork playing the piano. Without knowing “Mack the Knife,” this cartoon would make no sense at all and even for those who know the song, it’s still deeply strange to see living silverware.
2
An ingenious turn of phrase
“Curiosity killed the cat” is such a common expression that it takes a truly brilliant mind to find a way to make it funny and surprising, but that’s precisely what Larson did with this comic featuring a police detective examining a crime scene full of dead cats. To take the expression and explore it in the most literal way possible — with cats being curious in a scientific sense — takes some real genius.
1
No words required
This is another example of Larson taking something common and finding a way to fundamentally reimage it. While he did it with funny visuals and words in the previous one, this comic requires no explanation. It’s just a dog and a human in a car, with their roles reversed: the dog is driving and the man is excitedly sticking his head out the window. It’s simple, smart, and stupid all in one, representing a lot of what makes The Far Side creator Gary Larson a true genius.
