The Far Side comics are often a journey into the surreal and the absurd. While a number of Gary Larson's comic strips are open to various interpretations or are meant to be pure nonsense, others are built around a well-defined joke. In one instance, however, Larson's attempt to poke fun at individuality and uniformity was misunderstood by an editor, resulting in the cartoon being ruined once color was added.
The s of The Far Side are inhabited by various creatures, from dim-witted humans, to cunning cows, to suspiciously sinister ducks. One of the frequent sights of The Far Side world are the dapper denizens of the Antarctic, the noble penguin. More than once, the monochrome birds poke fun at living in a world without color: penguins are uniformly black and white, inhabiting a land of snowy whites. In an effort to create color posters from The Far Side comics, however, a touch of color turned Larson's original intent for a on its head.
In the early 1980s, Larson created a particularly iconic comic about penguins. A colony of countless penguins can be seen huddled in the Antarctic, dozens of beaked faces staring blankly forward. Among the crowd of feathered creatures, one alone rises up. A singular penguin, announcing to a seemingly disinterested world through song, "I gotta be me, oh I just gotta be me..." The act is a declaration of individuality for the bird, proud in walking its own road. The joke is, of course, that all the penguins (the singer included) look identical. There are dozens of penguins in the , each visually the same as the bird that's so enthused about its individuality.
How Editors Destroyed a Far Side Joke
Fate would turn the gleeful penguin's song on its head. With The Far Side's popularity reaching its apex, Larson's publisher's gift and stationary division decided to capitalize on the brand by turning a number of its strips into full-color posters. As Larson relates in The Prehistory of the Far Side, one strip chosen for the poster treatment was the singing penguin. In Larson's own words, the "particular cartoon featured nothing but penguins and ice, which didn't lend itself to color." To his surprise, the editors had found a use for color in the cartoon: the singing penguin was now a vibrant yellow. While the original joke undercut the penguin's joy with its obvious similarity to the others, the addition of color made it clearly and unarguably unique. "In other words," recalls Larson, "the entire point of the cartoon had been reversed."
The Far Side Reversal Was Accidentally True to Nature
While the editors in charge of the posters simply chose to embrace the penguin's unique nature by making it yellow, the situation actually has some basis in reality. While the King Penguins which inhabit the planet's southernmost islands and coastlines are generally black and white (with slight yellow markings), sometimes nature throws a peculiarity into the mix. In 2021, while photographing the birds on the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean, Belgian wildlife photographer Yves Adams spotted something "bizarre" - a lone, yellow penguin (as reported by The Far Side's accidental tale of a yellow penguin born from an editor's misinterpretation of a joke had become reality.
It's a bizarre story of life imitating art - and only because The Far Side's editors made an initial mistake that totally undercut Gary Larson's intended joke!
Source: The Prehistory of The Far Side, Audubon
