Gary Larson’s masterpiece syndicated newspaper comic, The Far Side, had many recurring jokes throughout its fifteen-year run, but one less-often utilized gag offers a uniquely potent insight into what made the strip successful. Larson’s jokes about characters crashing through windows make for a particularly great case study of the artist’s unparalleled ability to observe a single moment and extract humor from it.

The Far Side often repeated motifs, while continually finding inventive ways to achieve familiar punchlines. The strip’s “defenestration” panels offer a great example of this, but they are even better suited for exploring Gary Larson’s idiosyncratic brand of observational humor.

Larson’s cartoons regularly dropped readers into the midst of a chaotic situation, or introduced them to characters in the moment before a bad situation escalated into something worse. This distinguished The Far Side from many other contemporary newspaper comics, which tended to feature a progression of moments across multiple panels.

The Far Side Is A Masterclass In Depicting Singular Moments In Time

Larson’s “Defenestration” Jokes Are The Perfect Example

Far Side characters were often doomed; one of their creator’s patented tricks was depicting the moment right before catastrophe struck, cluing his audience in on what was about to happen, while leaving his characters oblivious to their imminent demise. Alternatively, there is a subset of Far Side jokes that are set in the aftermath of some unexpected, often traumatic occurrence. This latter category includes a gag Larson returned to several times throughout the years: the image of a person being thrown through a window.

The Far Side’s defenestration jokes emphasize creator Gary Larson’s ability to freeze-frame a single moment. Whether it was depicting a couple busting a move so hard that they burst through the window of their Beginner’s Dance class, or the quiet aftermath of a pogostick incident gone horribly awry, these panels highlight Larson’s strong eye for action and movement, and his keen sense of how to communicate that to his readers in a lone image. This is something that is evident in most Far Side panels, to one degree or another, but Larson’s drawings of people crashing through windows make it particularly apparent.

On an artistic level, characters going through windows represents one of The Far Side’s funniest visuals; even more crucially, it represents the thought, and the work, that went into every one of Gary Larson’s cartoons. Even the most seemingly throwaway joke, or seemingly hastily illustrated panel, was in fact deliberated over to great extent. Many Far Side installments had elaborate backstories, making it clear that Larson tended to come up with concepts for jokes first, and then worked to find the perfect image and caption to encapsulate the comic.

Gary Larson’s Observational Humor Defined The Far Side

A Unique Sense Of Perspective

Gary Larson’s humor is often characterized as absurdist, and there is certainly a strong vein of this throughout The Far Side. That said, his work can in fact be classified more as a form of twisted observational humor. Larson’s best jokes often contained a clash between the familiar and the unusual; this was a result of the fact that he wasn’t content with merely the “observation” stage of his comedy. In other words, once Gary Larson observed something, he then took the step of introducing some element of dissonance that threw the observation into sharp relief.

Beyond his work as the writer and illustrator of The Far Side, Larson’s true creative passion was playing jazz guitar. There is an analogy to be drawn between his novel brand of observational humor and certain types of music. To the untrained ear, jazz might sound chaotic, when, in fact, the interplay between various instruments is incredibly precise. Similarly, unacclimated readers often find The Far Side’s humor to be bizarre, but upon becoming more familiar with Larson’s work, they may come to recognize the underlying insights into human behavior, and culture, that the cartoon always contained.

Once it becomes apparent, this deep vein of observational humor in The Far Side is one of the things that most rewards readers who return to the comic repeatedly. During its daily publication, Gary Larson’s first and foremost goal with every one of his cartoons was to elicit a reaction from his readers, as all art and entertainment alike is intended to do in one way or another. Looking at The Far Side in retrospect allows readers the opportunity to more deeply scrutinize the artist’s work, peeling back the many layers often packed into even the most deceptively straightforward panel.

Writing The Far Side Was A Constant Process Of Discovery For Its Creator

The Perfect Mix Of Hard Work & Natural Talent

Aside from getting a rise out of his readers – whether it was a belly laugh, or a shout of dismay – and producing the best possible publishable material in any given week, Gary Larson stressed that there was no greater intentionality behind The Far Side. Certainly, the comic had its familiar themes, and was driven by its creators’ many obsessions. His positions on various topics are evident from how he found humor in them; yet Larson’s work can’t be said to have an overt agenda. Further, the artist outright rejected the search for “meaning” in his cartoons.

According to Larson, when he sat down at night to work on The Far Side, he relied on his intuitive creative sense to guide him, leading him to draw and redraw images, to write and rewrite captions, until he felt satisfied with the end result. His success was the result of having the determination, and the willingness to put in long hours of patient work, to match his inner creative drive. There are many things that make Gary Larson a remarkable, inspirational figure in American pop culture, but for aspiring artists especially, this is the most worthwhile lesson one can learn from him.

As enduringly engaging as The Far Side is, the creative process that went into it is equally fascinating. For Gary Larson, his own understanding of his art, and how it took shape, was always evolving; as a result, the strip continually evolved as well. Recurring jokes regularly took on new, unexpected forms, which allowed The Far Side to flourish, until its creator ultimately pulled the plug and retired as a cartoonist. As the old show business adage goes, “always leave them laughing when you go,” and by retiring at the top of his game, The Far Side’s creator Gary Larson did exactly that.