Gary Larson’s The Far Side made a daily newspaper panel feel like a small exercise in misdirection. Its humour could be broad, morbid, surreal or quietly observant, but the central goal was usually simple: land an exceptionally clever joke.
Comic strips can be judged in different ways. Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes sometimes reached for thoughtful ideas, while Garfield often succeeded through a sharp, relatable gag. Prince Valiant, by contrast, was admired for its detailed, picturesque artwork.
Larson’s work belongs to a different category. The Far Side was not primarily concerned with recurring characters, conventional beauty or profound life lessons. Even its most famous dinosaur jokes were not created to influence science. The measure here is more direct: how effectively does the idea surprise and amuse?
Using that standard, these are ten particularly strong examples, ranked from number 10 to number 1.
10. Find Peter
Larson trusted readers to do some of the work. This panel turns its punchline into a visual scavenger hunt, asking you to search through a series of office cubicles before the joke becomes clear. The payoff depends on noticing the right detail rather than being handed the answer immediately.
9. A deconstructionist masterpiece
Larson occasionally turned the mechanics of cartooning into the joke itself. Here, the characters are deliberately “sketchy”, with the rough drawing style becoming part of the gag. It is an unusually self-aware panel, but its success still depends on a quick visual idea.
8. The complete opposite kind of masterpiece
Subtlety is not required for a great Far Side. This scene is funny because the evidence is impossibly obvious: a man has been killed with a bowling pin, yet the surrounding police still cannot solve the mystery despite being surrounded by bowling pins.
7. A clever twist
Larson often refreshed familiar stories by finding the one situation that reverses their usual logic. Pinocchio wants to become a real boy, so the joke asks when becoming real would suddenly be the last thing he wanted. The reversal gives a well-known character a new comic angle.
6. More deconstruction
Newspapers once commonly included activity features such as hidden-picture puzzles and spot-the-difference games. Larson parodies that format with appliances placed conspicuously around a forest. The claim that there are 127 of them is the final absurd flourish, since the picture plainly does not contain that many.
5. Find the punchline
This panel rewards a slow scan. The eye first lands on the giant fly woman, then moves to the woman being painted, and finally catches the detail reflected in the artist’s glasses. The joke is assembled in stages, with each discovery changing how the scene reads.
4. Reconstruct the punchline
The gag takes the visual search one step further. At first, the scene appears to show a woman opening a window. Only after looking again do you realise that a window washer was occupying the space outside moments earlier. The missing figure is the punchline.
3. Snakes
Larson did not usually treat existence as a serious philosophical subject, but he was excellent at making it seem ridiculous. The image of God shaping snakes like a child moulding Play-Doh reduces a grand creation story to a wonderfully silly act of improvisation.
2. Love triangle
Like the bowling-pin panel, this joke gains its force from characters who fail to recognise what is directly in front of them. Their lack of insight creates the situation, while the audience is invited to spot the obvious relationship before they do.
1. Smoking dinosaurs
This is one of Larson’s best-known panels, and its appeal comes from several of his favourite ingredients arriving at once. He regularly returned to dinosaurs, enjoyed dark humour and was happy to make a joke that was deliberately lowbrow.
The image of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes is immediately funny, but the extra idea is what makes the panel memorable: perhaps smoking caused their extinction. It is a compact example of The Far Side at its strongest, combining an absurd image with a surprisingly neat twist.
Why these panels still work
The appeal of these comics is not dependent on elaborate world-building or long-running character arcs. Each panel establishes a situation, hides or twists the expected answer, and lets the reader uncover the joke. That visual economy is part of what makes Larson’s work so effective.
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