Gary Larson’s The Far Side is known for its surreal sense of humor and often morbid subject matter. However, over its decades of success, the strip has sometimes deigned to comment on the real world, targeting celebrities, politicians, and historical figures for its unique form of mockery.
Here are the ten funniest comics where The Far Side took aim at real people, including one of the most controversial strips Larson ever published, and one with an incredibly embarrassing inspiration.
10 Madonna
Madonna’s Blond Ambition Cone Bra Gets the Far Side Treatment
Designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, Madonna’s iconic cone bra is firmly fixed in pop culture, worn for her 1990 Blond Ambition tour. Here, The Far Side pairs Madonna’s style with its own indelible contribution to pop culture – the now-ubiquitous image of comic-strip characters lost at sea, usually in a rescue boat or surviving on a tiny island with a single palm tree. This strip falls into the category of The Far Side‘s silly visual gags, while Madonna’s inclusion in the comic shows just how big she was in the ’90s – Larson’s work is generally timeless, focusing on icons who fans will still know decades later.
9 Stephen King
The Horror Icon Is a Major Fan of The Far Side
This strip imagines a macabre childhood for Stephen King, though Larson is likely projecting here. Larson has blamed his brother for his morbid sense of humor – in The Far Side Gallery 1, Larson reveals how his brother’s teasing convinced him there were monsters everywhere, expanding his imagination. However, whether Larson was on-target or not, Stephen King doesn’t seem to have minded, providing the foreword for The Far Side Gallery 2 and praising Larson’s work in the strongest terms, saying:
I like Gary Larson a lot, partly because he turns the world as I know it inside out like a sock, partly because he turns the world as I know it into a funhouse mirror, but mostly because he does what artists and humorists are supposed to do: he sees what I could see if I could have his eyes. I don’t have them, but thank God they are on loan.
8 Donald Trump
The Far Side As Political Satire
While The Far Side‘s original run lasted from 1979 to 1996, Larson returned from retirement in 2020, tempted by the new possibilities of digital art. No longer on any kind of schedule, The Far Side‘s newer entries saw Larson experimenting with new techniques, but also – as in this strip – being inspired by current events. Larson depicts a single tear from Donald Trump among other immensely rare oddities, suggesting a habitual lack of remorse in the 45th President of the United States.
7 Edgar Allan Poe
Larson Has It In for Horror Writers
Not content with taking on Stephen King, Larson’s Edgar Allan Poe comic sees the iconic horror writer experiencing writer’s block over the title of his 1843 short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and rejecting the spleen, duodenum, bladder and stomach as the story’s fateful organs. One of The Far Side‘s favorite jokes is exploring the false origins of famous sayings (as the next entry also proves), and here the joke is the ridiculousness of using a different organ in a story where a killer is plagued by the beating of his victim’s heart.
Interestingly, like Poe, Larson is also a short story writer. In The Pre-History of The Far Side, Larson reveals that he sometimes thinks up flash fiction stories of only a few sentences, often using them as inspiration for comic strips. While funny, these stories often have their own macabre tone, for example Larson’s ‘Zoology’:
The bear and Carl lived together in the cave for several years until, one day, the true savagery of Nature being unleashed, Carl killed and ate him.
6 The Founding Fathers
Take That, Patrick Henry!
While we’ve chosen a breakdancing George Washington as the best of Larson’s Founding Father strips here, there’s also another example of the ‘origin of a famous piece of writing’ gag, which itself seems to be a rework of an earlier strip starring Abraham Lincoln (also included above.) Another great gag sees Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty, or give me death!” quote undermined when it turns out he used the phrase constantly, including to ask for potatoes at dinner.
However, the Washington strip wins out for one simple reason – the violinist defeatedly reflecting “There he goes again,” making it clear that Washington doesn’t just enjoy breakdancing, but engages in it so often that his staff are beginning to get sick of the spectacle.
5 Charles Darwin
A Surprisingly Cute Origin to On the Origin of Species
Sometimes The Far Side is dark, sometimes it’s witty, but other times it has a purely silly sense of humor that can catch you off guard. That’s the effect here, as noted naturalist Charles Darwin arrives for his research on the Galapagos and exclaims, “Oo! Wow!.. Lizard City!” like an excited 12-year-old. Larson’s keen interest in the animal kingdom comes in clutch here, as Darwin’s work with iguanas actually resulted in a lizard species being named after him: diplolaemus darwinii, aka Darwin’s iguana – the perfect ending to this sweet strip.
4 Pablo Picasso
Gary Larson Takes a Shot at the Founder of Cubism
A simple but perfectly formed gag, this strip reveals that Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portraits weren’t an artistic choice, but rather the result of his family’s unique looks. The comic works for several reasons – the presence of a Cubist baby helps push the visual gag past the finish line, while Picasso essentially being reimagined as an American school kid creates the low-stakes ‘in trouble with teacher’ misunderstanding.
3 Albert Einstein
Einstein Was Made for Far Side Parody
With his iconic hairstyle and genius accomplishments, Einstein was always destined to be targeted by The Far Side, and he appears in multiple comics by Larson. One of the best of Larson’s Einstein strips reveals his basketball career prior to becoming a scientist (though Larson preferred his first draft, with Einstein warning his son off a life of science), but our pick is the hilarious ‘origin’ of the E=mc² equation.
Not only does this joke put Einstein in the hilarious position of having tried every other option before inspiration strikes, but the strip also copies a common cliché where biopic movies simplify the work or inspiration behind a major accomplishment. The look on Einstein’s face – staring off into the distance, just about to realize what he’s missing – is a great example of how much Larson can do with his minimalist, stylized depictions of humans.
2 Jane Goodall
The Jane Goodall Institute Called This Strip ‘An Atrocity’
In this comic mocking Jane Goodall, her years studying chimpanzees are given another, amorous purpose. While Larson always respected Goodall’s work, the comic wasn’t well-received. The Jane Goodall Institute wrote to Larson’s editors, questioning “the editorial judgment of running such an atrocity in a newspaper,” and Larson later chose not to reprint the comic due to the reaction. That is, until Jane Goodall actually saw it.
After the National Geographic Society brought the comic to Goodall’s personal attention, it turned out she loved it. Larson visited Goodall’s research station in Tanzania and even helped raise funds for her work, and Goodall even wrote the foreword for The Far Side Gallery 5.
1 Gary Larson
One Far Side Comic Secretly Mocks Larson’s Own Mistake
No-one can call Gary Larson a hypocrite in making fun of the foibles of celebrities, since he’s just as happy to mock himself. In The Pre-History of The Far Side, Larson admits that this comic – in which an over-enthusiastic fitness buff brains himself while trying to use a chin-up bar – “came directly from my own personal experience.” Thankfully, Larson saw the funny side of the real life error, and even included his own broken glasses in the doorway.
While The Far Side‘s bread and butter may be self-serious cows and murderous chickens, it got some great comics out of mocking real people, with many rightly proud to have been welcomed into the weird world of Gary Larson.
