Gary Larson’s The Far Side loves nothing more than turning a familiar idea on its head, so it’s no surprise the series found so much inspiration in traditional nursery rhymes. While intended to comfort and entertain children, these songs – often stretching back centuries – include bizarre imagery and nonsensical narratives, making them perfect for Far Side-style twists.

Screen Rant has collected the 10 funniest Far Side comic strips that parody famous nursery rhymes, from Humpty Dumpty to Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Be sure to vote for your favorite entry in our end-of-article poll, and see how other readers rank these Far Side gems.

10

This Old Man

The Far Side Makes a Rare Exception to Its Single-Panel Rule

The Far Side is known for being a single-panel comic, but for this parody of This Old Man, Gary Larson needed to be able to show the passing of time. The effect completely works, as the pause before the old man ‘comes rolling home’ makes his arrival way funnier. While Larson’s other nursery rhyme comics do a little more work by imagining worlds in which nursery rhymes literally happened, there’s a very specific sort of joy in the idea that the opening lines of this rhyme (which can be traced back as far as the 1870s) someone act as a kind of summoning spell for men of a certain age.

9

The Cow Jumps Over the Moon

Gary Larson Was Never Going to Be Able to Resist This Hey Diddle Diddle Moment

The bizarre image of a cow jumping over the moon was basically made for The Far Side to parody, both because Gary Larson loves mundane characters performing bizarre feats and because The Far Side is already the go-to franchise for comics about cows.

Gary Larson’s cows have become a byword for The Far Side, appearing in many of the strip’s best gags and all over its various pieces of merchandise (though sadly Larson nixed plans to make a plush version.) In 1998, an interview with The New York Times revealed why Larson has such a fondness for bovine characters, as he explained why he uses the animals as his most frequent subjects – “I’ve always thought the word cow was funny, and cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.” The Hey Diddle Diddle strip shows exactly what Larson is talking about, as the cow brutally fails to get anywhere close to leaving the planet.

8

This Little Piggy

As Far Side Fates Go, This Guy Actually Got Off Easy

Traced back to the 1720s, this nursery rhyme is usually counted off on a child’s toes, with Larson taking this logic to its extreme by having one of the hapless character’s digits ditch him during the night in favor of a trip to the market. As freaky as it would be to wake up one morning missing a toe, this character gets off easy compared not just to other Far Side characters, but even other Far Side characters on this list…

7

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Far Side Imagines the Pleasant Nursery Rhyme in the Darkest Circumstances

Despite its family friendly reputation as a goofy newspaper comic, The Far Side has always had a major dark side. Indeed, one of the reasons Gary Larson didn’t want to use recurring characters in his strip is so he could abuse them as much as he wanted without readers feeling sorry for them. As he explains in The Complete Far Side: Volume 1, Larson wanted characters who could be “crunched, speared, shot, beheaded, eaten, stuffed, poisoned, and run over about twice a week.” Apparently, that list should also include sending a Boy Scout troop careening over a waterfall.

Larson uses Row, Row, Row Your Boat in multiple Far Side strips, apparently seeing the light-hearted nursery rhyme as the perfect counterpoint to some truly dark situations. Larson uses the rhyme for the doomed Boy Scouts, as a way for torture victims to kill time, and as the unwelcome soundtrack aboard a slave ship.

Larson’s light-hearted treatment of torture actually got him in trouble with Amnesty International. The human rights organization got in contact with Larson to argue against his comics showing torture dungeons in a playful light, arguing that depicting such circumstances as a thing of the past hurt awareness that real people are still being tortured all over the world. In The Prehistory of The Far Side, Larson comments that while he sees the comics as “mostly harmless,” Amnesty International “at least raised my consciousness to this problem.”

6

Old MacDonald Had a Farm

The Far Side Mixes Nursery Rhymes and Murder

The Far Side often adopts the perspective of animals over humans, and many of Larson’s comics set on farms play out as a war between livestock and farmer. In the case of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, The Far Side presented readers with two separate comics where the titular farmer’s animals kill him off.

While the chicken explaining its murder of Old MacDonald has its own surreal charm (especially in the context of The Far Side‘s other evil chickens), the murderous glee of MacDonald’s animals trampling him into the ground pulls off the same gag with fewer bells and whistles, while also showcasing Larson’s love of language and the menacing implication of Old MacDonald Had a Farm telling its ‘story’ in the past tense.

5

Pop Goes the Weasel

The Far Side’s Weird Courtroom Scenes Provide Some of Its Best Jokes

Larson’s love of wordplay returns in this strip, as The Far Side turns the ‘pop’ in Pop Goes the Weasel into an unexpected punch. The Far Side loves a courtroom scene, especially if it can engineer a legal disagreemnt between familiar characters. Indeed, Larson’s other court cases see everyone from the Headless Horseman to Mr. Potato Head to fellow Nursery Rhyme alum Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater getting their day in court.

While Peter having a sister named “Jeannie Jannie Eatszucchini” is a great gag, Larson’s imagery of the dopey monkey in the dock and an attentive weasel at its lawyer’s table wins out, especially because you’ll never be able to hear Pop Goes the Weasel again without thinking of Larson’s suggested meaning.

4

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty Fired Gary Larson’s Imagination Again and Again

More than any other nursery rhyme character, Larson loves using Humpty Dumpty in his comics. One of Larson’s best tricks in writing The Far Side is to use familiar ideas to set up his single-panel gags. Using familiar characters, situations and stories allows Larson to harness a lot of pre-existing context, meaning he can do far more with a single image. It’s likely for this reason that Larson has so many gags referencing Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz – readers know these stories and characters inside out, creating a lot of different reference points for Larson to subvert.

In the case of Humpty Dumpty, Larson imagines his childhood, his funeral, and even his mortal remains being served up as a giant omelet. There are so many bizarre details for Larson to pick at – from a character who’s a giant egg to Humpty Dumpty inexplicably perching on a wall to a group of horses trying to put him back together. Larson’s genius at combining the bizarre and mundane is showcased in our choice above, where the King’s men are asked to stand aside because it’s the horses’ turn to try and fix Humpty. However, there is one even funnier Humpty Dumpty comic that we’re saving until later…

3

The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

Hey Diddle Diddle Returns

Larson again chooses to exploit a phrase’s double meaning in this strip, where ‘run away with’ is taken to mean ‘eloped’ rather than ‘fled’. Interestingly, Larson seems to be referencing an older version of the rhyme than most people know. In modern usage, it’s usually the dish that runs away with the spoon, however Larson implies it’s the fork, which is the case in the oldest known version of the nursery rhyme from 1765.

Larson loves giving inanimate objects a voice, and has even created other comics where cutlery are the main characters. In the case of the strip below, Larson parodies another cutlery-based song, this time The Threepenny Opera classic Mack the Knife.

2

Mary Had a Little Lamb

Wordplay and Murder Make for the Definitive Far Side Recipe

Most of Larson’s nursery rhyme comics put a dark twist on their subjects, but this one goes even further by having Mary butcher and eat her ‘little lamb.’ Larson’s command of words makes this one of his best comics about a nursery rhyme character, as the caption stretches out the reveal with extra details, building to its grisly punchline. The exceedingly dark detail that Mary has “her blinds pulled” suggests that even she is aware how messed-up it is to be consuming her wooly companion.

1

Humpty Dumpty (Again)

Far Side Reveals What’s Inside the Egg

Humpty Dumpty returns in our #1 choice for Gary Larson’s best Far Side comic based on a nursery rhyme. It’s a perfect Larson gag to look at a character who is a giant egg and wonder what exactly is inside, capped by a textbook Larson underreaction from the King’s men, whose training clearly didn’t extend to the surprise arrival of a pteranodon. Larson’s inclusion of Humpty Dumpty’s blithe, vacant smile is the cherry on top of one of the funniest Far Side comics ever committed to paper.

Those are Gary Larson’s ten best Far Side comics starring nursery rhyme characters – let us know your favorite by voting below, and see which of these strips other readers chose as their #1.

Source: The New York Times