I was going through my 50 lb 2 volume slipcase collection, and found 2 classics that hadn’t been mentioned yet:
Baby carriage in the park. 2 birds perched on it. Caption: “I don’t get it. I’ve been stuffing worms in it all day, and it’s still hungry.”
Bar; 2 women and a woman/warthog (pearls, lipstick, harlequin glasses) seated at a table. A male warthog at the bar. Caption: “Oh oh, Lorraine, looks like somebody’s checking you out.”. The more I look at that one, the funnier it gets. I think its the glasses on the warthog.
We’ve got the one with the snake and parrot up at work.
A couple of other personal favs. In a petstore window, a snake has got it’s head and upper body out of it’s tank. It’s managed to squirm into the adjoining mouse cage. The mouse has a panicked look and is running like hell on it’s wheel. The snake’s head is bouncing off the top of the wheel, going “Fwap! Fwap! Fwap!”
The snake family at the dinner table. Mom, complete with tall hairdo and glasses, is just coming in with a platter of rodents. Junior’s saying “Aw Mom! Hamsters again?!”
Burrido - “Thunderstick!?! That my friend is a Winchester 30.06.” I worked for U.S. Repeating Arms and that one was plastered all over the place.
My fav’s:
The interior of “Bob’s Pets.” In the foreground in a fish bowl is a pirahna ($29.95). In the background is a cat looking at the bowl. The cat has two wooden front legs.
Two construction workers sitting on top of a high rise construction eating their lunch. One guy says, “You ever get that urge, Frank? It begins with looking down from 50 stories up, thinking about the meaninglessness of life, listening to dark voices deep inside you, and you think, ‘Should I… Should I… Should I push someone off?’”
Two Vikings sitting at a table. One is cradling a mace in one hand and saying “You know Bjorn, there’s just something about the feel of a good, solid mace in your hands that gives you the urge to smash something.” . Walking through a door behind him is another Viking, who’s just blown a huge bubble gum bubble.
In his book The Prehistory of the Far Side, Gary Larson points out that the caption to this cartoon was switched by accident in one newspaper with that of the Dennis the Menace next to it. This mistake, according to Larson, improved both cartoons. The Far Side now featured a snake family at the dinner table, with one of them saying “Lucky I learned how to make peanut butter sandwiches or we would have starved to death by now.” Dennis had Dennis and a friend of his eating sandwiches while Mom was on the phone, with Dennis saying “Oh, brother! Not hamsters again!” Larson also pointed out it wasn’t the last time that happened, either: The next time, The Far Side became a bit absurd (A caveman getting his fortune told, with the fortune teller now saying “If I get as big as Dad, won’t my skin be too tight?”), but Dennis was improved a bit (Dennis is now saying to his parents, “I see your petrified skull, labeled and sitting on a table somewhere.”)
I haven’t figured out what my favorite Far Side is yet, but my favorite Far Side error (also printed in Prehistory), just because it makes no darn sense, is an exterminator looking at a treehouse with children in it, saying “Eeny-oony-wanah! Eeny-oony-wanah!” (The caption is supposed to be something to the effect of “I can get the small ones out no problem, but the bigger ones might take a little bit of work.” A newspaper accidentially printed the cartoon with the caption from the previous day’s cartoon, a bunch of slugs chanting nonsense while worshipping their salt-shaker god.) Larson comments, “How many phone calls did I get asking me to explain this one? Don’t ask.”
—Scuzzy-looking shop teacher with his back to Nerdy Kid [sup]TM[/sup], who is standing next to a ginormous robot. “My project’s ready for grading, Mr. Big Nose…Hey, I’m talking to YOU, squidbrain!”
—Two coroners pushing gurneys in opposite directions through a field. “When a body meets a body coming through the rye.”
—Left side of panel: Elderly woman stands in doorway of house and calls out, “With a knick-knack paddy-whack give a dog a bone!” Right side of panel: Elderly man comes tumbling down the hill.
—The readers-response section of Pre-History was illuminating. After the panel in which a mosquito comes home, hangs up his hat, and sighs to his wife about what a hard day he’s had spreading contagion, Larson got a ton of letters from people eager to inform him that it’s the female mosquito that spreads disease. “Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable that insects live in houses, wear clothing, speak English…” He also got a great deal of heat from Amnesty International about panels having to do with prisoners and torture. “But what I want to know is, does ‘The Wizard of Id’ get letters like this?” (Very probably not.)
My favorite was one I only saw years after Larson stopped making The Far Side, in an anthology. I had no idea how I’d missed such a gem.
Atop a hill is a time machine, door open. Down the hill comes a determined-looking scientist in full stride, heading directly for the tail of an enormous dinosaur (the rest of the dinosaur is outside the frame). The scientist is carrying a gigantic rectal thermometer over his shoulder. The caption, from memory: “Moments later, Professor Higginbottom perished, forever clouding the question: warm-blooded or cold-blooded?”
That reminds me of an old favorite. Two polar bears are standing by an igloo that one of them had lifted up. In the distance you can see an eskimo fleeing. The bear holding the igloo says “I lift, you grab. Was that concept just a little too complicated for you Carl?”
What’s funnier is their bizarre spelling of what the dolphins are saying to them. On the dry erase board you can see stuff like “hah blah ess pan yol” and “byeno dee yas” and such.
The one that always makes me laugh uncontrollably for no explicable reason is the one with two gorillas dancing. One says to the other, “I believe you misheard me. I said I’d like a mango.” The artwork is just perfect and it really makes it funny.
The one with unfair aminal names. The few I can remember are the Booby, the sapsucker, and a man named Clarence.
Old West shoot out. One guy is dead face down. Across from him is a sloth with a smoking gun. A bystander says “Well, the sloth nailed him. You know, ol’ Hank never was exactly a quick draw.”
Finally someone posted “Birds of Prey know they’re cool” a personal favorite along with many mentioned already (Cat Fud, School for the gifted, Cattle drive quartets) but two that always get me are:
A mother cow and a friend are speaking as her teenaged son walks by with a few piercings and a leather motorcycle jacket on.
Mother Cow: He just wears the leather for the shock value.
And a dinner party at Tarzan’s Tree house, all of the animals are there and in the middle is an elephant with an angry expression on his face pointing at the piano.
The caption goes something like: “Tarzan’s dinner party was a huge success until Tantor noticed the piano keys”
Ooh, I thought of another one! Prison guard is ushering a new inmate into a cell. Already in the cell, in the top bunk, is a wild-eyed, wild-haired madman (looking, with eerie prescience, very much like Ted Kascyinski) tearing a pillow apart with his teeth. “Hey! Durk! New…roommate, Durk! New…room…mate! Friend, Durk! Friend!”
How did I miss that TWICE! Substitute vote… “all right Kevin, now go to sleep or once again I’ll have to knock three times and summon the floating head of death…”
I just had to post this here. Today’s Ziggy (Sunday 9/25) Features Ziggy coming up to a group of three Cows standing on their hind legs (upright) and says to them:
“I seem to have lost my way–could you direct me to my comic strip?”
When my son was about two, he received a mylar balloon in the shape of Winnie-the-Pooh’s head, about 2 feet wide. For several years, we referred to it as “The Giant Floating Pooh Head of Death”.
In my opinion, this is the single greatest comic strip ever published anywhere.
