Another far side that made me guffaw out loud was the cowboy in a sleeping bag under the stars. A scorpio was on his chest telling him “The others voted for me to come out here and ask you to stop rolling in your sleep”. Thats a paraphrase, but it was freaking funny as hell.
I agree with Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side as the best.
Two more good Far Sides:
Midvale School for the Gifted. You know which one I mean. No caption, no dialogue, but still laugh-out-loud funny.
And the one with three explorers, opening an ancient coffin, and the mummy inside, hands on his hips, saying, “Okay, let’s see. There’s a curse on you, and curse on you and a curse on you.”
Peanuts was funny was way back when, but lost it when it tried to get all cutsey-wootsey. They’re re-running the old strips in my daily paper and they’re just up to the point when Sally is born. I suspect they’re skipping big chunks and just running the ‘cute’ ones, though.
As for newer strips, Dilbert has its moments, but is running out of steam.
Get Fuzzy is pretty reliably funny.
Ah yes! I almost mentioned this one, because it did indeed crack me up back when I first saw it—one of the most “I sure didn’t see that coming!” moments ever.
The context was that, for the past few days, Charlie Brown had been going a little crazy and started seeing baseballs everywhere: the sun looked like a baseball, his round head looked like a baseball, his scoop of ice cream looked like a baseball… I forget how he got over it, but that last strip had him wondering if he was really cured of his obssession or not, waiting for the sun to rise, watching to see if it would look normal or if he’d still see a baseball…
…and it was a grinning Alfred E. Neuman.
I suspect it was Schulz’s shout-out to MAD, which occasionally poked fun at Peanuts and other comic strips in its articles.
My favorite Bloom County adventure was a good poke at censorship. First, there was a series of strips about Opus working at the Personals desk of the local newspaper. In one strip (hilarious in and of itself), he had to take an ad for a woman seeking “snugglebunnies”. “Hot, sweaty snugglebunnies.” :eek:
A few strips later, a series of metacomics (if that’s a word) begins, where the characters explain they’ve gotten angry letters from readers about their use of an obscenity. Yep, it’s “snugglebunnies”. The final strip is the kicker: The characters question, “What can this newspaper do?” and start chanting “Snugglebunnies! Snugglebunnies!”
The last frame is empty, and the second-to-last frame is cut off. 
My dear wife got me the Ultimate Far Side Collection for Christmas, and I’ve rediscovered a lot of old gems. One in particular is of note. The illustration is very simple: an ape has fallen from a tree, flat on the ground, with a surprised look on its face. The caption is: “The dawn of man.” There’s just something about that illustration, the look on its face, which when coupled with the caption cracks me way the hell up. I’m chuckling now just thinking about it.
The funny thing is, while I couldn’t stop laughing at it, my wife and her stepmom didn’t see what was funny about it at all. Her father, however, laughed just as hard as I did. Maybe it’s a guy thing.
From Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell”, a little snippet called How to decode your co-worker’s insipid chatter–
When they say: “G’night everybody! Have a good one! See you tomorrow!”
They really mean: “Go f**k yourselves.”
Nothing in the world so funny as Far Side. I have a few hanging near my desk right now, which I love.
- Two gorillas sitting in a tree, preening each other. The female gorilla picks a hair off the male gorilla and says “Well, well…another blond hair. Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?”
- A woman sitting in a chair, her back to you. You can see she’s naked. She’s on the phone and says, “Yes, this is Eve. Oh, hello Adam! The Garden? Saturday? Oh, I’d love to! Okay, see you there, bye.” She hangs up, and muses, “Oh my God! I haven’t a thing to wear.”
- A moonlight night and a wolf giving a sheep flowers. Captioned “Inevitably, their affair ended. Howard worried about what the pack would think, and Agnes simply ate the flowers.”
- Olive Oil walks in on Popeye cross-dressing, and says “Oh, Popeye!” And he says, “I yam what I yam!”
Bloom County was hilariously funny, too. We have nearly all their books floating around at home. We quote them, too, particularly the one about his ass falling off, and then the last panel is, “First I’d better cover my ass.” Plus the SO’s SIL is preggers and her brother is turning into Steve Dallas after he has a baby. I fully expect him to start talking about the coor of her vomit in a few months!
Today’s Classic Peanuts rerun (in those papers that get the later three-panel strips, as opposed to the earlier four-panel strips that seem to be the choice of most papers, and are the ones that appear on the Peanuts website), with a copyright date of 1993, is in the running.
Panel one: Snoopy looking at a “Falling Rock” sign. A small rock is falling through the air next to it.
Panel two: Snoopy walking.
Panel three: Snoopy encounters another sign, reading “Falling Things.” Falling through the air next to it are a tube of toothpaste, a spatula, a flashlight, a trowel, a pen, a pair of glasses, a paintbrush, a pair of pliers, and a coffee cup.
That could have been a Kliban joke!
Another surreal favorite is the one that ran the day Schulz announced his retirement. It was a single, wordless panel of Rerun sitting against a log, looking at a snowman holding a violin. The music coming from the violin is icicles on a music staff. The joke itself was okay, but the overall image was very serene and beautiful.
From the Far Side :
A dog being driven off in a car leans out and says to another dog : “Guess what ? I’m going to the vet to get tutored !”
The dog trying to lure the cat into the dryer with a trail of signs saying “Cat Fud”; thinking “Oh please . . . Oh please . . .”
In the Wild West, some outlaws are running off with bags of loot; the sherriff is unconcernedly saying, “Don’t worry; we’ll take the big horse”. In the background is a two-story tall horse.
A Wild West bar with a fight obviously going on inside, since a guy’s been flung out the window. In front of the bar is a hitching post with three horses, and a bear with saddle and reins attached.
Great Moments in Evolution : A fish sprinting across a tiny island with it’s cheeks bulging as it holds it’s breath.
From Bloom County, the guys considering whom to run for President :
“How about Jesse Helms ?”
“No, that would offend the left.”
“How about Jesse Jackson ?”
“No, that would offend the right.”
“Let’s run them both ! Jesse & Jesse for '88; the Offend Everybody ticket !”
Oh, Calvin and Hobbes, I miss you.
One of my favorites was when Calvin was waiting an eternity for his beanie (with a propeller) to come in the mail after sending in boxtops or something. You see him wearing the beanie, flying around town. Next frame shows him running in to his house asking mom, “Did my beanie come today??”
You probably have to be a writer to truly appreciate how wonderful this particular strip was and is, but I framed a Shoe Sunday strip from 1979.
The first four panels show The Professor Cosmo Fishhawk sitting at his typewriter, thinking. Each has a big empty word balloon floating over his head. Then the idea hits, shown in his mind as the most elaborate possible illuminated letter-style A, symbolizing the beauty of the idea as writers conceive of it. He taps the key on his keyboard. And it comes out as the plainest starkest merest typewritten A.
The last panel shows him tossing the crumpled page over his shoulder.
Nothing, nothing I’ve even seen or read or heard about writing, and I’ve seen and read and heard it all, captures the reality of writing like that one strip. It’s true and it’s perfect. And it could only be done with pictures.
Does anybody remember the Virgil Partch cartoons? Every one of them was hilarious!
“Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts!”
I remember his syndicated strip, Big George. I don’t think it was quite on the same level as his more adult stuff.
Hee, I remember Footrot Flats. They cracked me up as a child. Unfortunately, Amazon.com only seems to list them for exorbitant amounts. 
In, I believe, The Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson relates what followed from that strip. It seems that one of the mid-high-level functionaries at the Jane Goodall Institute took umbrage at the suggestion that Dr. Goodall would be called a tramp and wrote a letter threatening legal action. Dr. Goodall herself LOVED that strip, and when she heard about the letter, she basically nixed any attempts on the Institute’s part to make trouble about it.
[Nitpick]Wouldn’t they have been chimpanzees?[/Nitpick]
Maybe the female gorilla found a brunette hair on a silverback, from that damn slut Dian Fossey.
One of my favorite Far Sides is the two bears in the crosshairs of a rifle. The smart bear is pointing at his doofus clueless bear buddy as being the easier target.
“Bummer of a birthmark, Bob…”
I sent this to my cousin, who was in a “krishna” phase when it came out. He loved it, and temporarily stopped soliciting my family for donations to his prayer temples. AFAIK, he is still a Krishna, but doesn’t bother me about funding his pear pimples.
In the same vein as “pear pimples”, Opus watching a Mr. Rogers-type show:
“Can you say ‘politician’?”
“Bozo!”