Back in the 1980s and 1990s, nothing in the comic strip section of the newspaper was quite as dark as The Far Side. In Peanuts, Lucy van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown as he was about to kick it is about as dark as things got. In Garfield, the lazy cat’s darkest running gag also revolved around a kick — when he’d kick Odie the dog off a table.
Meanwhile, The Far Side was doing jokes about hangings and murder — death was a regular punchline. Along with that, Larson also liked to make light of whatever came after death. Occasionally he’d make a joke about Heaven, but he seems to have found Hell far more amusing, with many comic strips taking place in the underworld — or in some specific version of it — making Satan a recurring figure in his comic strips.
While few characters in The Far Side appeared more than once, the Devil himself made many appearances. Here are six Far Side comic strips featuring the Devil, who, according to Gary Larson, doesn’t seem to be that nice of a guy. In this comic from June 11, 1988, a pizza gets delivered to Hell and Satan is clearly unhappy about it.
The best little detail in the comic strip is the slogan on the pizza box. It says “Jerry’s Pizza: We Deliver Anywhere” and Jerry clearly lives up to her word. I can understand the Devil’s annoyance.
Pizza is one of the greatest pleasures on Earth, which means that pizza is absolutely disqualified from being served in Hell, even though there’s a perfect-looking pizza oven literally everywhere you look. A recurring source of humor in Gary Larson’s comic strip was to take a common phrase or idiom and interpret it as literally as possible. In one comic from 1992, he picked apart the common phrase “ride off into the sunset” by depicting a burnt-up cowboy that had literally ridden into the sun.
In another comic from 1985, he played on the phrase “dressed to kill” by showing two sharks in fancy evening attire. In this comic from 1982, Larson dissected the phrase “To Hell and back” by turning Hell into a mere tourist destination. In it, a man is showing off slides from his vacation, which include a picture of his wife standing with the Devil.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
