The Far Side/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Revision as of 16:47, 21 September 2019 by Robkelk (talk | contribs) (DEFAULTSORT)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)



  • Accidental Innuendo: "When dogs dream." Larson acknowledged that the unfortunate placement of the dog relative to the vehicle's mechanically correct underside caused many readers to assume that the dog was mating with the crankshaft case, instead of simply howling victoriously over its kill.
    • In The Complete Far Side, Larson discusses his panic after realizing the woman he drew for the cover of In Search of the Far Side resembled a gigantic penis.
      • His editor's reaction: "So?"
        • Larson points out how silly it was to panic in retrospect, by recounting the story on the page AFTER the cover image, asking readers if they even noticed before reading on themselves.
  • Crazy Awesome: A Cloudcuckoolander is shown merrily toiling and whistling along in hell with one devil saying to another "you know, we're just not getting through to that guy."
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: The Pillsbury Doughboy getting chased and run down by a cement roller.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: "Suddenly, on a national talk show in front of millions of viewers, Dick Clark ages 200 years in 30 seconds." That's pretty much what happened after his stroke.
  • Genius Bonus: In one comic, there are 2 scientists. 1 is explaining some complex math that shows that those many wrongs equal a right. However, if you do the math described, It equals 0. 0 wrongs make a right.
    • Antidaephobia, the fear that a duck is watching you. Antidae is the scientific name for the duck family, which Larson describes as "a joke a dozen ornithologists got, and everyone else just went , 'what the hey?'"
  • Hate Dumb: The collected set of cartoons showcases a sampling of irate letters from readers, most of whom completely missed the point.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: This [dead link] comic was published years ago. This is a 2011 summer blockbuster, leading to many jokes that the movie is an adaptation of the Far Side comic.
  • Memetic Mutation: This strip is the inspiration for the "Blue Screen Of Death" nickname for Windows' ultimate failure state. (And, by extension, Heroic BSOD.)
  • Never Live It Down: The infamous Cow Tools strip, and a few other particularly offensive ones.
  • No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Larson claims that the Cow Tools incident will haunt him for the rest of his life, but it actually generated an amazing amount of publicity for the strip, and probably helped boost his circulation. Go Figure.
  • Uncanny Valley: Larson's attempts at drawing people look a little... off.

Back to The Far Side