In recent months, I’ve been examining the best-ever quotes from various newspaper comic strips, and in that time I’ve determined that every comic strip requires its own approach. For Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, I went with something heartfelt and inspirational because those comics and characters really have inspired people. For Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, I investigated something more philosophical, as the best of those comics make the audience contemplate human nature and the world around them.
But for Gary Larson’s The Far Side, well, the task is monumentally different. He didn’t do inspirational. Many of his cartoons required you to think, but not because they were thoughtful in the lofty sense.
They required thought because Larson’s work was brilliant, and you sometimes had to figure out what the punchline was. For example, this comic strip where an artist is painting a woman as a half-fly creature. You likely see the woman or the painting first, and you wonder why the artist is painting her that way.
Only after inspecting the comic more closely do you see the dead fly on his glasses. Larson’s work often requires the reader to investigate something, but usually not in any kind of overly deep way. The Far Side was — and remains — brilliant, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you ponder life’s big questions.
Larson channeled his genius into joke-telling, and that’s what made The Far Side so sharply funny. As such, determining Larson’s best-ever Far Side quote shouldn’t be some insightful, inspirational, or thoughtful journey — even though I did try going that way at first. I thought maybe the quote should come from a comic about God, as several Far Side comics feature God as a character.
But after reading a whole bunch of Larson’s God comics, I determined that God actually isn’t all that deep or interesting. Sometimes he’s just kind of a jerk. Then I thought to look up comics about death, thinking that maybe Larson had something profound to say on the subject.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
