The Far Side, written and drawn by Gary Larson, was a syndicated comic strip known for its surreal, at times subversive humor, all delivered on a daily basis in a single panel, most often accompanied by a caption composed of only one or two sentences. Several times throughout the comic’s history, The Far Side‘s caption was transposed to an adjacent comic – something Larson believed was no “accident.”
In The Prehistory of the Far Side, a retrospective collection put together for the strip’s tenth anniversary, Gary Larson exhibited two examples of caption swaps. It was Larson himself who put quotations around the word “accidentally” to describe the 1981 mix-up of a Far Side panel with a Dennis the Menace cartoon – suggesting that he believes it was done intentionally by a mischievous, if creative, editor.
The Far Menace
The Far Side first appeared in print in 1979. The first swapped caption incident detailed in Prehistory occurred in 1981, early in the strip’s run. In typically bizarre fashion, The Far Side panel features a family of snakes at a dinner table, waiting for their meal. Dennis the Menace features Dennis and his brother chomping on sandwiches while their mother is on the phone. The Dennis caption is simply, “Oh, brother!…Not hamsters again!” The Far Side strip says, “Lucky I learned to make peanut butter samwiches or we woulda starved to death by now.” The swapped captions give Dennis a taste of Far Side’s quixotic air, while the Far Side comic reads as unusually straightforward.
Dennis Might Need To See A Therapist
Gary Larson wrote in The Prehistory of the Far Side regarding the mix-up with Dennis the Menace, “What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.” Whether the result of an “accident” or not, the gonzo creativity resulting from swapped captions is what made The Far Side so unique, so insightful, even when it was being iconoclastic, or morbid, or both. In Prehistory, Larson notes another caption swap, again with Dennis the Menace, occurring soon after the first. While describing the results for his own comic as “nonsensical” – not necessarily a knock against The Far Side – he thought the Dennis strip turned out “rather interesting.”
Featuring two prehistoric humans in a cave, one reading the other’s fortune, The Far Side caption is amusing, if perplexing, outside its original context. The Dennis the Menace strip is hilarious. “I see your little, petrified skull…labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere.” Coming from one cave person to another, this would have been funny. Coming Dennis to his parents, it is as darkly funny as any single panel of The Far Side. While it will never be known whether Gary Larson was right, and the switches were done intentionally, but it is clear that he believed, or at least wanted that to be the case.
