From 1980 until 1995, cartoonist Gary Larson wrote and drew The Far Side. It was a single panel comic strip filled with non-sequitur, surreal jokes mostly aimed at adults instead of children, which was unusual for newspaper comics at the time. Also unusual was the fact that, unlike most daily comic strips, The Far Side had no recurring characters.
Peanuts has its gang of kids and Garfield has its cast of humans and animals, but every panel of The Far Side introduces new characters and scenarios all aimed at delivering one single joke. That said, Larson did have some themes and types of characters he’d often return to. Dinosaurs, for example, were a big one.
Larson would depict them doing normal human things like eating breakfast cereal (with a free kid inside) or smoking cigarettes (the real reason they became extinct, according to Larson). He also liked to explore the domesticity of prehistoric life through cavemen and to lampoon historical figures and moments. But if one recurring theme of Larson’s The Far Side is a standout, it’s cows.
Over the 15 years he worked on The Far Side, Larson created 4,337 different comics, and he returned to cows again and again. He’d depict them doing normal human things or villainous things behind the backs of humans (especially farmers). In an interview with The New York Times, Larson once explained his cow fixations, saying, ''I've always thought the word cow was funny,'' he said. ''And cows are sort of tragic figures.
Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.'' Here, I took a shot at finding the 10 funniest-ever The Far Side comics about cows, though with so many to choose from, there's definitely some room for debate. The beauty of Larson’s The Far Side is that jokes could be very thoughtful and subtle, whereas others could be more basic, silly, and understandable by children. This one, with a cow realizing she’s been eating grass, is a fairly straightforward gag anyone can enjoy.
This next cow gag, from July 8, 1982, is a bit more subtle and probably a bit dated too. Back in the day, travelers would need places to sleep and if the farmer didn’t want them or trust them in the house, the person would be sent to the barn instead (or, at least, that’s what happened in movies). This Far Side comic is a simple, yet pretty hilarious role reversal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
