9 Funniest 'Far Side' Comics From the 1990s That Prove Gary Larson Is a Genius

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The 1980s were the best decade of The Far Side for one simple reason: there were just a heck of a lot more of them. Gary Larson’s comic strip debuted in 1980 in The San Francisco Chronicle and slowly expanded to more papers throughout the decade. Larson initially drew six cartoons a week before expanding to seven. He continued until October 1988 when he took a sabbatical until January 1990. When he returned, he did just five comics weekly until the strip ended in 1995. So, roughly, about two-thirds of Gary Larson’s The Far Side came from the 1980s.

That said, the quality of his comics never declined, which means the 1990s still generated hundreds of hilarious Far Side comics. Here are just nine of them that are completely perfect, proving that Gary Larson is an absolute genius.

The beauty of The Far Side was the wide-ranging humor. Sometimes the comics were incredibly subtle, requiring you to carefully read over the comic and maybe even inspect it a few times before you’d put all the pieces together to get the joke. Other times the comics featured a simple, funny idea that was immediately clear. This comic strip is a great example of the latter, where it's merely a funny idea that cows can be purchased piecemeal, getting one part at a time. The image of the headless cow in the back of the farmer’s truck is especially funny.

This is another one where it’s merely a simple, funny concept that’s immediately clear to the reader. The idea that wiener dogs are transported via shipping tubes is incredibly silly, and Larson’s drawing is all about making the simple idea abundantly clear, with dogs being brought from the back, then being stuffed into tubes, and the tubes going out for delivery all in one rectangle. While there’s a lot going on in the comic, the simple, absurd concept is what makes it so funny.

On the other end of the spectrum is this comic, which has a pretty long caption for a Far Side cartoon. Usually Larson relied more on the visual, but this is an example where you really have to read the whole thing and figure out what's funny. At first, the guy seems to be talking about ending his own life and jumping from the high-rise construction site. But when you get to the final line is when you realize he’s considering pushing the other guy off. It’s a hilarious slow burn that pays off masterfully.

Generally, when you think of Gary Larson comics, animals, dinosaurs, and strange-looking people come to mind, but sometimes Larson would also anthropomorphize non-living things as well. This one is about an adult peanut telling a scary campfire story to two little peanuts, and, because they’re peanuts, the story is about the most frightening thing to them: peanut butter.

This is another example of Larson anthropomorphizing non-living things to convey human emotions. In this case, Larson brought the phrase “don’t run with scissors” to its most ridiculous extreme, by having a jogger who regularly runs with a living pair of scissors, break the news to his exercise partner that they can no longer run together. Especially great here is the cute little pair of scissors in running gear. Larson hardly ever did “cute” drawings, but you can’t help but feel sad for this little pair of scissors.

Like the "running with scissors” comic strip above, this is another example of Larson taking a common turn of phrase and bringing it to its most absurd conclusion. For this one he tackled “face in the crowd” and he presented the face as just a face, without a body or anything else. The result here is so absurd that it’s actually kind of creepy looking.

The genius part of this comic strip is the overkill of it all. The idea of a scientist creating a translator for dogs is funny on its own, but, realistically, dogs probably don’t actually have much to say — just repeating “Hey!” over and over again is probably pretty accurate. An extra layer of funny here comes from the disappointment the scientist feels once he realizes how much he has wasted his time.

Sometimes Gary Larson’s subject matter was so edgy that it makes you wonder how these comics ran in hundreds of newspapers next to kiddie fare like The Family Circus and the like. This comic strip, which features addicted wolves snorting “quack” is a great example of, “How did he get away with this?”

Gary Larson’s comic strip was often very dark, with gruesome death as a recurring punchline. Even the most peaceful subject matter would sometimes be distorted through his disturbed filter, like this parody of the artist Bob Ross, who used to talk about painting “Happy trees” on his public access instructional painting show. The idea that Larson would see that peaceful little show and make it into a tree falling on a person shows that Larson was a darkly comedic genius.

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