Being barely able to add 2 + 2 and arrive at 4, I’m partial to “The Math Phobic’s Nightmare”:
A recently dead person is standing at the Pearly Gates before St. Peter, who is saying, “A train leaves Boston at 3:45. Another train leaves Chicago at…do you need a pencil?”
Not meant as a hijack at all, but this reminds me of one where St. Peter is interviewing three guys at the gates and asks them progressively more difficult questions. It seems there may have been an ethnic tone involved. All I can remember of the third question is the punchline to the joke: “Name them.”
Did it have to do with the survivors of the Holocaust? Maybe the Supreme Court Chief Justices? In any case, the first two questions were much simpler.
Fear the THAGOMIZER!
Nitpick - It was Dennis the Menace, not Peanuts.
“Anthropologists! Anthropologists!”
I cuss, you cuss, we all cuss for asparagus.
Another one of those awe-blah-ess-pan-yoll sounds!!
(Sorry for the paraphrase)
No.
Oh, he was great, no doubt. But he isn’t up to people like George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Windsor McKay, or Crockett Johnson.
favorite is this.
In the window you see a couple of cows gathering around a cow who is sitting on a fence. When you pull back you see a farmer, looking out his window at this scene, with his hand on a switch.
Caption- Cow: “If it was electric, could I do this?”
The anticipation is just too much for me to handle. LOVE IT!
I’d hesitate to call him the best ever, but he’s waaay ahead of the pack and definitely a front-runner.
Two favorites:
No captions, no dialog, but says so much.
Best ever? Not even close. He was a one trick pony with a couple of nice variations, nothing more.
June 24, 1876: Custer’s last group photo (Custer and his men holding up “We’re No. 1” signs and grinning into the camera.
“Call of the Calf” by Zeek.
Nothing comes close to CAT FUD though. All-time favorite.
“Notice gentlemen, that the faster I go, the more Johnson sounds like a motor boat.”
I like the one that has pilot and copilot flying their plane towards a huge cloud bank with the top part of a mountain goat visible through the clouds.
Caption reads “What’s a mountain goat doing up here in the clouds?”
Cow tools.
Because it was so bizarre and incomprehensible. (By Larson’s own admission, he didn’t even consider what the tools might be used for.)
“Me Tarzan! You Jane” (Damn…)
One weakness of Larson’s was that the ‘math’ on his blackboards was totally meaningless gibberish. As a math geek, that’s one thing I deeply appreciated about Bill Amend’s Foxtrot - the math shown in the strip was the real deal.
Oh, god yes! I love all the “caveman” ones–“Future Werld”, “Early scientists describe the first dirt molecule”, “Prehistoric Waiting Rooms” (Magazine: Cave & Tuber, add for Paleozoic Lights).
My understanding is that Larson didn’t want to keep producing after the well of inspiration dried up. He wouldn’t have been the first to do that by any means. But that being the case, I wonder why he couldn’t find a venue where he would only have to do one occasionaly? Like the New Yorker? He’s ten times as funny as Gahan Wilson.
I’ve always liked the one that showed the poor, ragged guy crawling through the desert, in the broiling sun.
He crawls up to a guy on horseback, who says “Peanut Butter Sandwich?”.
COW (in horror/disgust): “Wait a minute! This stuff is grass! We’ve been eating grass!”
