My favorite:
A dance studio. A bunch of cats are paired up, dancing. Two dogs are dancing together. The caption: “Police later reported that the two dogs just waltzed in, grabbed the cat, and waltzed out.”
The Far Side cartoons are like my childrens. I can’t pick a favorite. I love them all.
But if I had to pick one it would be the one with the kid trying to get into the gifted school. He’s pushing on a door trying to get into the building. The funny part? The door is labeled pull.
That’s a good one.
I also like the one with a man pushing a vacuum cleaner through the forest. The caption was something like “It was getting dark, it was getting lonely, and Arthur knew that nature abhors a vacuum.”
Too many to count, really, but off the top of my hea:
Cows standing around on their hind legs, chatting and smoking cigarettes, until one of them shouts “Car!” and they go back to being cows.
and
The cat trapped in a suburban living room, gazing out the window at two trucks that have just crashed and spilled their cargo everywhere, said cargo consisting of birds and small rodents.
I think it was on he cover of a calander or something, but the one with a frog hanging by its tongue from an airplane taking off is pretty funny.
Anyone remember the Far Side cartoon special? One segment had an airliner whose passengers and crew were all various bugs. The encounter some turbulence and then splat onto a car’s windshield, all tiny.
I loved that show! My husband and I must have watched our tape a dozen times. My favorite part was when the bug airliner experienced its turbulence, and a little warning light that said “UH-OH” flashed on, beside the “FASTEN SEATBELTS” sign. All the bugs started twittering “UH-OH! UH-OH!”
I was so disappointed that this special didn’t turn into a series. If anyone can equal Matt Groening, it’s Gary Larson.
I like the one with the pet store truck over-turned in front of this woman’s house, and there are hundreds of tarantulas crawling away. The one guys says something like, “we’ll never catch 'em all anyway, we’ll just let insurance take care of it.” And the poor woman is standing there while all the tarantulas are streaming towards her house.
I like the one where the elephant’s talking on the phone while leaning on a crutch with fresh bandages on his recently amputated leg. He says to the person on the other end, “What do you mean ‘they made a wastebasket out of it’?!”
Or something like that…
I also like the one that pictures Moses as a kid sitting at the breakfast table. His milk is parted inside the glass, and his mom says, “Moses, quit playing with your milk and just drink it!”
Ack - how to choose? I have several dozen taped to the wall behind my chair; I’ll just pick one:
Two guys sitting on a bench along the wall in Hell. One guy leans over to the other and whispers, “I hate this place.”
Gary Larson spoke at our university commencement, and it is one of my few college memories - the theme was something like “Dare to be weird.” I have a particular fondness for Hell-themed panels, or for slave ships.
With dialog:
A scraggly man is crawling through the desert and is just about to reach a water hole. Overhead are two vultures, one is carrying an upright piano.
First Vulture: "Dang, looks like he’s going to make it.
Second Vulture (w/piano): “Oh no he’s not.”
No dialog:
A herd of antelope in the distance and a cheetah is sitting on a rock, lacing up his tennis shoes.
There’s an airport; control tower, runways, everything. Except instead of a plane, there’s a giant infant lying on the runway with its arms othstretched (and another one overhead). The pilots are sitting on his shoulders.
“Fuel, check. Oil pressure, check. We’ve got clearance. Okay, let’s get this baby off the ground.”
The description really doesn’t do it justice.
The caption says something like: Bob foolishly puts himself between a mother grizzly bear and her cubs.
In the panel we see Bob, an office worker in a suit, in the act of stepping onto an elevator. In the elevator car huddle a few bear cubs, and out in the elevator lobby is the mother bear, now enraged at Bob.
Kills me every time.
An old west gunfight has occured. The winner stands above the deceased loser, peppering him with factual questions such as…“What’s the average rainfall in the amazon river basin?” A bystander chimes in…“Bob, you fool, you can’t shoot first and ask questions later.”
It’s cornball, but I love it.
I always was particularly fond of one where two big, spear-carrying men in armor are on guard duty on top of a tower in a castle. One of the men is sitting on the ledge, and the other man is saying, “Mom said no sitting on the edge, Wayne.”
The pure absurdity of it kills me.
Too many to choose, it’d be easier for me to list the ones i don’t like (can’t think of any though…)
some of my favorites…
“Hey, look what Zog do!”
(a group of cavemen sitting around a fire, holding their raw meat in the fire with their hands, in obvious pain, one caveman is looking over at a “geeky” looking caveman (Zog) who has impled his meat on a stick and is using the stick to hold the meat in the fire)
“Labaratory Peer Pressure”
a group of horribly (but amusingly) disfigured scientists are holding out a smoking test tube to the last remaining “normal” looking scientists and staring at him intently…
"the heartbreak of “Morning Face” "
a couple arises from bed with their face all out of order, eyes, nose, mouth all in the wrong positions (very Picasso-esque)
“Thwarting the Vamp-Cow”
a man holds a STEAK (T-Bone) in front of a bipedal cow with a cape drawn across it’s nose
Several signs promising “cat fud” are leading a feline into an open clothes dryer, off to the side a dog is thinking “Oh please, oh please.”
I like both cats and dogs, as well as dark humor.
I love the caveman ones. Like two cavemen standing outside of their cave looking up at a giant wall of ice. “Say, Thag, wall of ice closer today?”
My favorite only appears (AFAIK) in The Pre-history of the Far Side. The scene is of a surgery, with lots of doctors huddled around the operating table. One of them is holding his arm up to the left, apparently holding up something removed from the patient… for the dog in the OR, begging for scraps.
GL said of that one, "I didn’t even try to publish this.
Also in that book was a drawing of a fat snake in a playpen. The caption was, “No, you really didn’t see this. Turn the page.”
Moses as a kid – check.
Cow lookout shouting “Car!” – check.
I love the one with the bone-in-the-nose jungle native warning the villagers, “Anthropologists!” while his neighbors scurry around hiding their television and other appurtenences of “citified” living.
And the one that he labeled as though it was a work of art in a gallery:
The picture shows the interior of a wasp’s nest. Couple of wasps standing around looking concerened. One of them, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora is staring at a hole. The hole was probably punched in the wall when the little boy scrunching himself against the far wall threw a rock through it. The detective wasp says, “Judging from the direction of the damage, the rock was thrown through the wall from inside.”
Artist: G. Larsen
Medium: India ink on paper
Title: “It Was Late and I Was Tired”.