What’s your favorite “Far Side” cartoon?
Mrs. KVS: Where the cows are standing and talking, one of them says, “Car,” they get down on all 4’s, and stand up again after the car goes past.
Mine: Mr. Peabody backing the car out of the driveway, hears a thump, and notices a pair of glasses in front of th car.
Off to Cafe Society.
Jonny unwittingly instigates a disaster.
(kid on flight reaching for volume control on chair arm, accidently hitting a “wings stay on / wings fall off” button instead)
Spiders building enormous web at the bottom of a playground slide:
“If we pull this off, we’ll feast for a month!”
The spaceship has landed, the door is open, and at the top of the ramp, three aliens looking down at the fourth, who’s obviously fallen down the steps. “So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.”
::wanders through Larson card catalogue::
Lessee… Gary Larson and Aliens - (the Moonmen looking up at a mushroom cloud exploding on Earth going ‘Oooohhh…!’ is good - keep that in mind)… Cavemen… Cows… Dogs… Deer… Ducks… Hunters…
What’s this? A six-panel Far Side? Cool.
(Tarzan swings through the trees, thoughtfully pondering what to say to her)
Okay… {How do you do, my name is Tarzan, and I believe you are known as Jane.}
{Allow me to introduce myself… I am Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle… and you?}
{You must be Jane… I am Tarzan. It’s a pleasure to meet you.}
{There she is.} ::swoops onto tree branch Jane stands on::
“Me Tarzan! You Jane!”
::covers face with both hands::
“Damn.”
By far the one where the guy has his doggy door boarded up and he’s calling to the dog to run faster to come in. Funny as hell.
Nerdy kid leaning hard on a door marked “PULL” - for the Millvale School for the Gifted.
“The King of the Sheep” one was wonderful.
I was always partial to Larson’s historical cartoons, such as “Washington Crossing the Street”, which showed Washington and the group from the famous painting of crossing the Delaware River striding through a crosswalk, and “Custer’s Last View”, which was drawn from the point of view of a guy laying on his back looking up at a bunch of smug Indians (er, “Native Americans”) who were about to scalp him.
I second Mr. Moto–definitely “School for the Gifted.” I used it as an MPSIMS thread title recently, when I was afflicted with a similar problem.
Set in hell, the Devil and his assistant are monitoring the toiling of all the workers and one guy, pushing a wheelbarrow, is just strolling along, whistling a little tune to himself, happy as a clam
The Devil says to his asst: “Y’know, we’re just not getting to that guy”
I second Corbomite’s selection of “Me Tarzan You Jane.” In fact, I still have that one in my wallet, buried under pictures of my kids.
My favorite Gary Larson cartoon, though, was one he did prior to the Far Side, which appears in his book “Pre-History of the Far Side.” It has Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly lion standing at the door of Frankenstein’s castle, and Dr, Frankenstein, with the monster in the background, says “Sorry, I just used my last heart and brain…maybe try the wizard down the road.”
I have about 100 favorites.
The angry mob heading out of the “Institute for Migraines” and over to the school for marching bands. ‘The dam bursts.’
And you gotta mention the cavemen before the days of soap. Even though it violates one of Larson’s cartooning laws.
“Damn. There that thing goes again and here we sit with no opposable thumb.”
This probably shouldn’t count, but in the Prehistory there’s a section on cartoons that were accidentally run with the wrong caption, and this one always cracks me up:
A woman is standing next to a man who is pointing up at a tree with children some climbing in it, announcing, “EEEEEEEEEEEE WANNNI WANNNI NUUUUU!”
I don’t know why it’s so damn funny, but there you have it.
A group of cowboys standing around a fire roasting a whole horse.
“Well, old Roy here said he was hungry enough to eat one, and then I thought, well, shoot, so am I, and one thing sort of led to another…I guess it was some kind of hysteria.”
Roast Horse
Oops, guess I can’t link directly but it works if you cut and paste it.
My absolute favorite is the one where a little kid and his dad are standing at a fence looking at the neighbor’s house, which has been taken over by wolves, and the dad says: “I know you miss the Wainwrights, Bobby, but they were weak and stupid people, and that’s why we have wolves and other large predators.”
I also like the one with the picture of the hissing cat, the coiled rattlesnake, and a man wearing an innertube, with a shoe on his head and a bazooka in his hand. The caption reads “How Nature Says ‘Do Not Touch’.”
Oh! And the one where a guy is cornered by a thug in an alley, and he has bull’s-eyes paintd on his head, and the caption reads, “Feeling threatened, Sydney flashed his eye spots.”
And then the one where the scientist washes up on the desert island and there’s a duck standing there, and the duck says, “So, we meet again Professor! But this time the advantage is mine!”
And then the one…ah, hell, I love 'em all!
Oh… post links, can we?
