7 Hilarious ‘Far Side’ Comics With the Worst Puns

Gary Larson’s ability to marry cheesy puns with genuinely funny drawings is proof of the man’s genius

One of the best possible recipes for comedy is to have incredibly dumb characters written by incredibly smart people. Homer Simpson, for example, has often been written by Harvard-educated writers staffed at The Simpsons. Fry on Futurama is the same kind of character, as is Michael Scott from The Office, and basically every character on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

In the medium of comic strips, the best example of dumb characters written by a genuine genius is The Far Side, where Gary Larson features some hopelessly stupid subjects. That’s where the funny comes from. But Larson would also use that smart/dumb dynamic in another way unique to The Far Side. He did this by making use of the occasional pun or intentionally lame bit of wordplay. While Larson often made jokes with deep scientific knowledge or subtle gags that acted like a puzzle where you have to look hard to find the punchline, sometimes he simply took a turn of phrase and put some truly stupid spin on it.

I don’t know Larson’s motivations for these kinds of jokes — other than to make people laugh — but for me it kind of works as a bit of a Far Side palette cleanser. After a bunch of overly smart jokes in a row, it's fun to see Larson do something delightfully dumb. Here are seven great examples of the highbrow genius Gary Larson making use of the most lowbrow turns of phrase.

7 “Tar pits” does kind of sound like “carpets”

Tar pits are naturally-forming geographical phenomena where asphalt deposits mix with petroleum, creating black, sludgy pools on the surface of the Earth. The La Brea Tar Pits are a particularly famous series of tar pits in Los Angeles, known for their many paleontological studies and specimens retrieved from them. So what does Gary Larson do with that? He notices that “tar pits” rhymes with “carpets” and makes a silly comic strip featuring people getting sucked into a carpet — so dumb, yet so genius.

6 The opposite of convenience stores

If a convenience store is a little place of business with all the convenient items you need in a hurry, an inconvenience store is the same thing, but with all of those items placed well out of reach.

5 So that’s where boneless chicken comes from

This hilarious sight gag is some of Larson’s best work. In the late 1990s, the Cartoon Network series Cow and Chicken featured a recurring character named Boneless Chicken, who had no bones. He was a very funny character, especially visually, but Gary Larson did come up with the exact same gag more than a decade earlier.

4 Do people still know who Carmen Miranda was?

Back in the 1940s, Carmen Miranda was a popular star in Hollywood. The Portuguese-born Brazilian singer, dancer, and actress was known for her memorable headpieces, many of which featured fruit. In generations since, however, she’s mostly known for the impressions Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters did of her. In the late 1980s, more than 30 years after Carmen Miranda’s death, Gary Larson also got in on the action in the most Gary Larson way possible: a cow with fruit on its head named “Cowmen Miranda.”

3 Sketchy

This one feels both very dumb and very smart. Dumb for how it uses the word “sketchy” so literally, and smart for the way it kind of deconstructs the whole comic strip medium.

2 Have you seen these trains?

A long long time ago, missing children, including runaways, would be put on the sides of milk cartons. The adjective “runaway” is often paired with trains as well as children, so Larson decided to put runaway trains on milk cartons, too.

1 Gary Larson’s least-favorite Far Side comic

In his collected book The Complete Far Side, Gary Larson put a note below this comic reading “Cartoonist’s note: Above is my own nominee for the worst cartoon I ever drew. (I still cringe.) — Gary Larson.” While I can see why he thought it was stupid, there’s no way it's any stupider than “La Brea Carpets.”