YMMV / The Far Side

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • "When car chasers dream." Larson acknowledged that the unfortunate placement of the dog relative to the vehicle's mechanically correct underside caused many readers to assume that the dog was mating with the crankshaft case, instead of simply howling victoriously over its kill.
  • In The Complete Far Side, Larson discusses his panic after realizing the woman he drew for the cover of In Search of the Far Side resembled a gigantic penis. His editor reacted with a simple "So?" Larson then points out how silly it was to panic in retrospect, by recounting the story on the page after the cover image, asking readers if they even noticed before reading on themselves.
  • He also recounts an incident where his editor turned down a strip where a character was called a "dork," Larson having no idea until then that the word is a term for "penis."
  • Another that a dairy farmer brought to Larson's attention. One comic involved a couple cows going through a farmer's home, with one cow opening a freezer and looking in with shock. Most might assume that the cow found frozen steaks. However, a dairy farmer wrote in and asked Larson if the cow found either steaks or frozen harvested bull semen. The comic takes a whole new tone with that in mind.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: One cartoon is captioned "Midget westerns", featuring audiences watching Hang 'Em Not So High. They actually did make a midget western.
• Crazy Is Cool: A Cloud Cuckoolander is shown merrily toiling and whistling along in hell with one devil saying to another "You know, we're just not reaching that guy."
• Crosses the Line Twice: The comic practically lived off of this, what with the religious and political jokes.
• Fair for Its Day: A lot of comics feature stereotypical depictions of Native Americans and jungle tribes. These were considered as and meant to subvert stereotypes with Larson's absurdist and dry tone. However, since the stereotypes are used at all, these strips would be seen as tasteless or offensive in decades following.
• Genius Bonus: A major part of its appeal. There's a reason so many science teachers have Far Side strips hung on their classroom doors.
  • In one comic, a scientist is explaining some complex math that shows that many wrongs equal a right. However, if you do the math described, it equals 0. 0 wrongs make a right.
  • Anatidaephobia, the fear that a duck is watching you. Anatidae is the scientific name for the duck family, which Larson describes as "a joke a dozen ornithologists got, and everyone else just went 'what the hey?'"
  • Two shipwreck victims find an island where one happily proclaims they'll have plenty to eat as it's completely covered with oysters, the joke being that this means the island will be completely underwater at high tide.
  • One strip depicts a man named Mohammed sitting in his house when a mountain rings his doorbell. This is based off an idiom from Francis Bacon that goes "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain".
  • The dinosaur skeleton on the cover of "The Prehistory of The Far Side" at first appears to be an inaccurate three-fingered Tyrannosaurus rex... until you realize it's an Allosaurus.
  • One of the new cartoons in 2020 has bears eating Cub Scouts, a play on how bears will occasionally eat their own cubs.
  • The strip for January 21, 2021 featured "Club Nematoda" with The Chanteuse singing "What is this thing... called parthenogenesis?" - Larson's publisher didn't know that parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction, and Larson admitted in the commentary for it that it fell under both this and What Are Records?, as quite a few people wouldn't know about the original song being referenced.
    • The commentary also notes that he was mistaken - Nematodes do not reproduce asexually, but "Club Annelida" doesn't have the same ring to it.
      If you have to explain a joke, it’s over. The explaining does absolutely nothing to save it. I know that, you know that. But with this one, what can I say? I cracked.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "Suddenly, on a national talk show in front of millions of viewers, Dick Clark ages 200 years in 30 seconds." That's pretty much what happened to Dick Clark after his stroke.
  • One cartoon has an orca and a bottlenose dolphin at a SeaWorld-esque show, with the orca telling the bottlenose, "The herring's nothing... I'm going for the whole shmeer!", implying that the orca is going to eat his trainer as well as the fish he's being offered. Since the strip was published, there have been an increasing number of captive show orcas attacking and even killing their trainers due to stress, making this strip harder to read in recent times.
• Heartwarming Moments: Two men are sitting on a "Far Side" Island and one thanks the other for being his friend. It doesn't seem like a lot, but given how dark Far Side's world can be, it's sweeter than it sounds.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This◊ comic was published years ago. This was a 2011 summer blockbuster, leading to many jokes that the movie is an adaptation of the Far Side comic.
  • One strip features two young squids who are referred to in the caption as "the squid kids".
  • There's a strip where hopeful parents dream of future job advertisements for a person highly talented at video games as they watch their game-obsessed kid. Decades later, eSports, Let's Play, YouTube and Twitch streamers, and various other gaming-related ventures have become financially viable, and many people have indeed turned their aptitude for video games into a career.
  • One strip titled "Monster Jobs" practically predicts the premise of Monsters, Inc..
  • One early strip features a character who looks almost exactly like Professor Hubert Farnsworth.
  • In a strip about a cockroach having a nightmare about a talking shoe, said cockroach's name is Carl.
  • One strip has Herman Melville rejecting several ideas for the first line of Moby-Dick, one of them being "Call me Al".
  • Larson's strangely inaccurate attempt at drawing xenomorphs, with a pointed head and brow ridge, looks almost exactly like the Deacon in Prometheus.
  • The strip invented a word for "fear of being watched by ducks", anatidaephobia. Come 2020, and humans have good reason to fear the anatidae.
  • A strip captioned "Albums to avoid" features, among other fictional albums, Metallica and the Andean Pan Pipe Players. Nearly 20 years later, the band's collaboration album with Lou Reed, Lulu, would receive an extremely polarizing-to-negative reception from both fans and critics.
  • One strip featured a vulture dressed in a jacket and cowboy hat, saying, "Look at me, everyone, I'm a cowboy! Howdy, howdy, howdy!" Larson considered it in retrospect to be a bit over the top. However, the line was popular enough to be referenced in Toy Story.
  • A 1983 comic depicted a fictitious Psycho III where Norman apparently just drops all subtlety and instead of wearing a dress and simply stabbing his victim in the shower, opts to just smash down the bathroom wall with a tank which prematurely alerts the soon-to-be victim to his presence. A real Psycho III would hit theater screens in July 1986, though tanks would unfortunately be absent from Norman's shower-slashing shenanigans.
  • 1992's "Colonel Sanders at the Pearly Gates" features the Colonel arriving at a heavenly gateway flanked by two golden chicken statues, and a chickenlike design in the gates' ironwork, with him saying "Uh-oh" at the implications. Just six months later, Calvin asked his parents "What if we die and it turns out God is a big CHICKEN?? What then? over dinner (where they were presumably having chicken).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • This strip◊ is a possible inspiration for the "Blue Screen Of Death" nickname for Windows' ultimate panic state (and by extension, Heroic BSoD).
  • "Anatidaephobia: The fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you."
  • Cow Tools ^ExplanationA single-panel comic from 1982 that depicts a cow standing by a table with a number of mostly unidentifiable and crude tools which it presumably made. The bizarre nature of the joke quickly gained it infamy as people called Larson's publisher to ask what the comic meant.
• Misaimed Fandom: One strip titled "The Holsteins visit the Grand Canyon" showed a cow family getting a picture in front of the Grand Canyon with one calf doing a Bunny Ears Picture Prank to the other. The latter detail was missed by many readers who thought the other calf was simply wearing a bow on its head, and thus Gary was pleasantly surprised when the comic became popular for reasons he didn't expect.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • After a strip about cavemen calling a Stegosaurus' tail-spikes a "Thagomizer" after the late Thag Simmons, the scientific community realized there actually wasn't a proper name for Stegosaur tail spikes and adopted it.
  • A species of lice, Strigiphilus garylarsoni, is named after Larson. He takes great pride in this.
    • He also has a beetle and a butterfly named after him.
  • From the animated special, the segment where the deer breaks into the hunters' pub and beats up all the hunters (which turns out to be a scene from an action movie for deer).
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Larson tried to downplay the creepiest imagery in his strips by drawing them to look as silly as possible, but a lot of both the visuals and the concepts are still pretty disturbing nonetheless. The first animated adaptation, on the other hand, is positively loaded with Nightmare Fuel (the second one tones it down a lot, but doesn't eliminate it completely).
  • One strip shows a duck hunter with his decoys... and a huge dark shape lurking in the reeds, waiting for someone to go for its "woman" decoys.
  • A family have just finished their dinner on a dark and stormy night, when the family dog takes off his disguise.
    "No, I'm not your little dog Fifi! I'm the chicken you thought you fixed for dinner! Would you like to know where your little Fifi is? Ha ha ha ha ha!"
  • For cat-lovers, the "tethercat" strip, in which two dogs have tied a cat to a pole with a tether and are batting it around. In a section of the anthology book The Prehistory of the Far Side, Gary discusses complaints he received for various strips; he reasoned that one of the elements readers found most disturbing is that even if you close the book, once you reopen it to that page, whether it's a minute, a day, or 40 years later, those dogs will still be playing tethercat. For this reason, the trope Offscreen Inertia was once called "The Tethercat Principle".
  • The "scrambled babies" strip, where an anthropomorphic chicken tells a chicken waitress that he wanted his human babies sunny side up instead of scrambled. Especially when you realize that that mush that the otherwise silly-looking baby heads and limbs are sticking out of is probably not scrambled (chicken) eggs...
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Larson claims that the Cow Tools incident will haunt him for the rest of his life, but it actually generated an amazing amount of publicity for the strip, and probably helped boost his circulation. Go figure.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The strips can be considered the 80's equivalent of South Park, Family Guy, or Robot Chicken. Just look at the controversial cartoons section of The Prehistory of The Far Side. Yet, even the rejected cartoons seem tame in comparison to the stuff on TV and the Internet today!
  • In addition to the dark or "controversial" nature of Larson's humor, the absurd scenarios and scientific references common to The Far Side have become exponentially more common in online humor and webcomics, in this the age of Tumblr and Wikipedia.^note Considering the comic ended in 1995, the year before the Google search engine was first developed, many strips bordered on Viewers Are Geniuses at the time.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The strip Larson drew for Earth Day of 1990, which features a bunch of sad animals (and one tree) standing around Mother Earth, who is lying in a hospital bed comatose with tubes attached to her.
  • Tales From the Far Side has a sequence with a depressed old wolf watching old home movies of it frolicking with its mate, which end with the mate caught in a bear trap as a hunter walks up. Cut to the moonlit woods as the old wolf gives a mournful howl.
  • One strip shows a giant beetle laying on the operating table of a veterinarian's office, surrounded by the vet and its owner. The vet states that the beetle is dying, and the most ethical thing to do is euthanize them. It's made a bit silly due to the fact that pet is a giant bug, and the doctor's advice is to squish it, it's can still be a disheartening read to anyone who's lost a pet like this.
• Unfortunate Character Design: One comic features a sleeping dog dreaming of having caught a car and howling in triumph atop it called "When dogs dream". Larson said later he drew in the car's transmission box where it was supposed to be, and the editor cleared it to be published when he was inundated with mail from people thinking the dog was having sex with the car (Larson's defense that it isn't is fairly ironclad: "I know because I drew the damn thing in the first place."). The caption has been changed to "When car chasers dream" to rectify this, and on occasions the transmission box has been edited out.

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