The Far Side is as consistent with its tone as it is with its absurdist humor. Gary Larson has long since mastered his craft and found a pattern in his work that proved to be wildly successful. However, sometimes the prolific cartoonist took a step away from his typical standards to create something as equally funny as it is different.

While The Far Side is well-renowned for Larson's consistently surreal tone, use of anthropomorphic characters, and lessons regarding societal and environmental, the cartoonist has deviated his work away from the norm to embrace fresh topics. Typically, Larson prefers to create abstract scenarios that are often detached from things like politics, sports, and anything too serious, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes, Larson takes a dip in a different direction, but, regardless, the results are often just as hilarious as his "typical" work. Here are, ten hilarious Far Side comics that are very out of Gary Larson's usual style.

10 Once A Year I Just Have To Say That

Multi- Comics Are Uncommon For Larson

This rare multi- Far Side strip is a sharp deviation from Gary Larson’s traditional one- norm. In this comic, Larson revisits one of his classic tropes as two men are trapped on an incredibly small island. “Bob” and his friend “Al” quietly sit on their deserted island in silence, until Al suddenly rails into Bob for getting the duo stuck in the first place. After another of silence, Al gives a quick apology for his outburst before noting that the two must have been stuck on the island for years.

While Gary Larson is normally able to get the best out of his jokes with only a single picture, the elongated pause between Al’s random outburst lengthens the comedic tension between the two characters. Frankly, Larson needed an entire just so Al could let out his full rant. While this isn’t a common trope in Larson’s work, it fully helped deliver the punchline in a way a single couldn’t have.

9 Einstein Played Ball Before Science

Larson Rarely Covered Sports In His Comics

Gary Larson loves portraying celebrities in his work, especially for the sake of a good joke at their expense. However, Larson didn’t enjoy creating The Far Side comics about sports very often, making this piece a rarity in his collection. Here, Einstein is imagined as a successful basketball star, even in his old age, before a life-changing injury forever ruined his career in sports and he was forced to divert to science instead.

Funnily enough, despite Einstein’s older age, he still flexes his genius intellect on the court, as he alone fends off an entire team while in the paint. The hilarity of this comic stems from the cultural idiom “brains vs. brawn,” as Larson takes a prod at the mystification society often does to real-life figures’ origin stories. While sports may be an uncommon topic for The Far Side, this comic is an absolute slam dunk.

8 Donald Trump’s Single Tear

The Far Side Almost Never Touched Politics

While Larson was frequently unafraid to criticize modern society and sometimes joked about history in The Far Side, he more frequently avoided politics as a whole. After the conclusion of The Far Side’s original run in 1996, the writer and artist returned from retirement in 2020 just in time for the United States presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Larson had few kind things to say about former President Trump.

In this comic, onlookers gather around a museum of rare oddities, including a meteorite and a fossil. In the center of the exhibit stands a jar with a single tear labeled “Donald Trump Tear.” The American president has often been criticized for his callousness towards others, prompting Larson to create what is one of his few political cartoons. While this may be uncommon for Larson’s work, it does leave one wondering how funny other political comics could have been.

7 Why Don’t You Play Us A Tune?

Not Many Comics Have Likable Protagonists

Gary Larson’s surreal use of his characters often presents his nihilistic and pessimistic thoughts about humanity, so it’s incredibly rare when The Far Side has a likable protagonist. In this comic, a group of cowboys are sitting around a fire underneath the night’s stars when one of the men asks another to play them a tune. Normally, one would expect the musician to pull out a harmonica or a guitar, not an entire grand piano from his back pocket.

While we never get to see the aftermath of the cowboy’s piano skills, this is one of the few Far Side comics where the characters aren’t the butt of the joke. It breaks from The Far Side’s normal tone of cynical irony to instead display nice people simply being nice without any sarcastic spin. Compared to his normal work, this comic is unusually kind to its unsuspecting cast of characters.

6 Earth Day 1990

Every Once In A While, Larson Became Overtly Serious

While Larson’s work is most often referential humor, twisted with his absurdist representations of society, morality, and religion, they are ultimately jokes. However, in 1990 Gary Larson and a coalition of other cartoonists banded together to create a series of conservationist-themed comics in celebration of Earth Day. In this comic, there is no punchline. Instead, a group of animals and trees, many of which are endangered, look down upon a sick and dying Mother Nature.

All that said, Gary Larson, joking or not, is an open and well-known environmentalist. This comic, while incredibly serious in tone, aligns with his well-documented love of biology and nature. The cartoonist employs his typical use of anthropomorphized animals, but, this time, without using them as stand-ins for humans. Instead, Larson leverages his fame and iconic animalistic art style to tell a significantly more heartbreaking story about humanity’s mistreatment of the Earth.

5 The Chin-Up Bar

Larson Once Drew A Comic About Himself

Within one of The Far Side’s official collections, Larson included a comic that features a man knocked out on the floor after having apparently attempted to use an at-home chin-up bar. While the man in the comic tried his best to improve his physical health, his intentions were made pointless when the very self-helping action fell apart with disastrous results. The best part is that this story is about Gary Larson himself.

In the collection, Larson shares that his comic-creating process was “rarely spontaneous” and that this particular comic is the only one that “came directly from [his] own personal experience.” While the creator primarily focused his work on real-world issues and societal critiques, this story was probably far too funny to not include in at least one of his collected works. While the event may have bruised Larson’s head and ego, it did make for a hilarious Far Side comic.

4 Dennis The Menace Meets The Far Side

Dennis Literally Stole Larson’s Joke

When comic strips like The Far Side are collected in newspapers alongside other comics like Calvin and Hobbes or Dennis the Menace, there are bound to be occasional errors when bringing the cartoons to print. In 1981, the Dayton Daily News accidentally swapped the captions for a Far Side comic and a Dennis the Menace comic, leaving a sinisterly macabre unintentional joke underneath Dennis’s comic. While Gary Larson’s snakes seemed to enjoy some peanut butter sandwiches, Dennis seems less happy that he’s having hamsters for dinner again.

However, in The Prehistory of the Far Side, a retrospective collection of Larson’s best works, the cartoonist suggests that the caption swap may have been an intentional prank by the paper’s editor. Regardless, this rare slip-up unintentionally led to one of the funniest Dennis the Menace comics to ever exist. Funnily enough, this isn’t the only time The Far Side accidentally crossed over with Dennis the Menace, leaving readers to wonder if these caption swaps really were mistakes or the intentional actions of a deviously funny editor.

3 It’s The Dung Beetles!

Larson Was Never Allowed To Use “Scatological” Humor

Despite Larson’s willingness to explore the crude and unusual, he was bound to a set of norms and social rules that would have been considered truly scandalous by the public, including the use of “scatological humor.” In The Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson explains “I've spent the last ten years dying to do a cartoon about dung beetles (hasn't everyone?) but I've always known their very name would present editorial problems - let alone what I'd have them doing.” That’s right, editors were terrified of potty jokes.

While today’s standards would most likely have no problem with these sorts of jokes, the editorial standards in the ‘80s and ‘90s seemed to be more quaint and delicate. What makes this extraordinarily hilarious, is that some of Larson’s other rejected comics, such as a dog being fed leftovers from a surgeon, were justifiably too dark to publish. Apparently, potty humor was just as condemnably profane as Gary Larson’s darkest jokes.

2 “Oh no, Elliott!”

One Of The Few Times Gary Larson Went Too Dark

Speaking of dark jokes, this is probably one of The Far Side’s darkest comics yet. Besides the basic joke that a snake contorted itself into its own noose, there isn’t much more of a joke in this comic past that. Maybe Larson is suggesting we should check on our snakes more. Who knows? Regardless, while The Far Side isn’t afraid to make things dark, this is certainly an outlier for Gary Larson’s work.

Larson has since acknowledged that this is one of his most controversial s, exposing how thin the line between his standard dark absurdity and dark realism really is. Despite how harrowing the punchlines in The Far Side normally are, Larson has always managed to step just far enough to engage in discussion without pushing personally uncomfortable realities. This is ultimately one of Gary Larson’s few tonal miscalculations, albeit one that is crudely comedic in its own way.

1 Hell’s Video Store

The One Comic That Got Larson In Trouble

While the last entry may have been one of Gary Larson’s most controversial Far Side comics, this strip actually put the cartoonist under serious heat, so much so that he felt the need to apologize for it. In this comic, a group of men condemned to Hell are pursuing Hell’s video store, except only copies of the 1987 comedy film Ishtar. While the film has received a substantial number of negative reviews, it’s now considered a modern cult classic.

In The Complete Far Side. Vol. 3, Gary Larson its that, at the time of making the comic, he had actually never seen Ishtar. He says that “years later, [he] saw it on an airplane, and was stunned at what was happening to [him]: [he] was being entertained.” He later itted in the apology that there are many cartoons that he could have issued apologies for, but that this one was the only one that compelled him to do so. In classic Gary Larson fashion, even his apology rings with The Far Side’s classic, un-serious tone.