Summary
- Larson's obsession with cows in The Far Side leads to hilarious milk-themed comics featuring bizarre situations.
- Satan's mom hands out milk and cookies, and farmers struggle to milk cows who are just as smart as they are.
- Which of these strips is funniest? Vote for your favorite in our end of article poll.
Gary Larson's Larson often features cows in his jokes and has a longstanding fondness for idyllic images of American life, including kids sitting at the breakfast table with a bowl of cereal and a carton of milk. These odd ingredients combine into a great selection of milk jokes.
We've collected the 15 funniest Far Side comics where the gags center around milk, showing just how funny dairy can be once you add Gary Larson's surreal imagination. Don't forget to vote for your favorite Far Side milk comic in our end-of-article list.
15 Elephant Breakfast
Larson loves showing weird characters enjoying an idealized American breakfast. Here, he imagines one sibling telling on another for playing with his milk, with the goofy twist that they're both elephants. Larson often shows contentious sibling relationships in The Far Side, and has cited his brother's childhood torture of him as a major influence on the comic and his wider sense of humor.
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14 "Just Cross Your Legs"
Why Gary Larson Used Cows So Often in The Far Side
This strip shows how Larson's obsession with cows results in milk making frequent Far Side appearances, as a cow desperate to be milked shows all the signs of a little kid who needs to pee. Many of Larson's most iconic comics feature cows, to the extent that cows are the first thing that fans think of when the topic of The Far Side is raised. Asked in an interview with The New York Times why he includes so many cows in his comics, Larson explained:
I've always thought the word cow was funny, and cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.
Larson loves animals, and much of Far Side's humor comes from taking normal animal experiences and giving the creatures experiencing them human intelligence (for example, the early strip where a cow realizes that the delicious substance she's been eating for years is actually just grass.) However, Larson pushes things further with cows, imagining an entire secret life that humans never see. Larson's cows are bipedal until they see humans coming, often plot revenge against the farmers who keep them imprisoned, and even try a little steak now and then just to see what all the fuss is about.
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In taking animals' side so often, Larson comes to the unavoidable conclusion that some animals like cows and chickens exist primarily to satisfy the dietary needs of humans, and many of his strips derive dark humor from imagining exactly how they feel about that. Obviously, being milked is a bizarre situation once the cows have human intelligence, and several of Larson's best milk gags reference this fact.
13 Giraffe Breakfast
The Far Side doesn't get enough credit for tapping into classic Americana for its gags. Here, it evokes the 1980s practice of including 'Missing' ments on milk cartons. Of course, in a giraffe society, these pictures only work if the ungulates in question can actually see them while they're eating, necessitating incredibly tall milk cartons. Larson includes an extra gag of the giraffe eating Acacia-Os - a breakfast cereal twist on the Acacia leaves Giraffes like to eat in the real world.
12 Satan's Mother
Larson's Take on Hell Includes the 1 Strip He Apologized For
Another major obsession of The Far Side is Hell, and specifically the idea of the Devil as a kind of beleaguered boss trying to keep his business going while surrounded by feckless employees and endless mischief from his 'customers.' While The Far Side often depicts a brutal world where its characters can die horribly for very mild transgressions, it interestingly flips the script when depicting Hell, which is generally depicted as failing to deliver on the promise of eternal damnation. In the strip above, the Devil's mom makes life easier for Hell's new arrivals by ing around milk and cookies, with her demonic nature apparently being overwhelmed by maternal kindness.
However, Satan's mom isn't the only cause he has for frustration, as The Far Side's strips show that Hell is plagued with graffiti, the damned ordering in pizza, and incompetent demons who keep allowing Satan's charges to escape. Given how harsh Far Side's world can be on humans and animals alike, it might actually be a relief to wake up in Gary Larson's version of Hell. Outside its more pleasant flaws, there is one element of Far Side's Hell that Larson always regretted. In The Complete Far Side, Larson apologies for a strip showing Hell's video store, which exclusively contains copies of the 1987 movie Ishtar.
Larson writes that while he'd heard the movie had a terrible reputation, he'd never personally seen it. That changed one day during a flight when it was offered as the in-flight movie, with Larson gamely watching along. The Far Side creator its, "I was being entertained. Sure, maybe it's not the greatest film ever made, but my cartoon was way off the mark." Larson even goes so far as to say, "There are so many cartoons for which I should probably write an apology, but this is the only one that compels me to do so."
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11 The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg
Larson puts his own dark twist on the Aesop fable of 'The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,' introducing less and less impressive animals (a sheep that gives silver wool and a cow that gives chocolate milk), devolving to the point where the actually useful animals are either chased off or killed by the neighbor's dog.
10 The Cold Cereal Cookbook
In this strip, two dim-witted characters need a cookbook in order to make cereal, and even then they mess up the recipe. As with the giraffe, Larson uses the ceral to throw in an extra gag, mocking the two foolish characters by pairing them with 'Dorkies.'
9 Runaway Trains
In another joke based on the 'Missing' ments on milk cartons, Larson plays around with the world 'runaway,' which denotes both an out-of-control vehicle and a child who has left home without their parents' permission. It's simple, goofy wordplay, but also raises the dark question of why so many trains are running loose in the first place.
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8 Vampire Cow
Larson's Vampcow Starred in Two Far Side Strips
Reading through Far Side, it's quickly apparent that Gary Larson loves classic horror movies, with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and more appearing in his comic strips. In this comic, Larson's ubiquitous cows get their own version of Nosferatu in an undead cow who, instead of thirsting for blood, drinks the milk of other cows. This character actually appears in another strip, which enhances the joke by showing the "vampcow," complete with a hilariously inexplicable widow's peak hairline.
As funny as the larger gag of a vampire cow is, the best detail is that the undead bovine can apparently be warded off by brandishing a 'steak,' bringing a surreal horror gag right back to The Far Side's affection for puns.
7 "I Better Not Catch You"
Larson's best trick is creating an entire story using just a single , and this Far Side strip exemplifies his skill at doing so. The gag is silly on its face - a woman's dog has been secretly drinking milk from the bottle - but tells a whole story of the woman noticing that someone was drinking out of the bottle, beginning to suspect the dog, then lying in wait to catch her hound in the act.
6 Milk Off a Duck's Back
While Gary Larson stated his goal with each Far Side comic was to make readers exclaim "What the--", he also loves wordplay, especially if it means pushing a popular idiom to its silliest extreme. Here, Larson invents a world where the idea of describing something as slipping away like "water off a duck's back" came about thanks to scientists who knew they wanted to use a liquid sliding off a duck, then carried out extensive testing to find the right liquid, in this case including orange juice, syrup and of course milk.
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Cows may be the banner stars of The Far Side, ducks are the strip's unsung heroes. While Larson's cows have secret lives, his ducks are often explicitly menacing. They spy on innocent people, kill off old ladies by pushing them down the stairs, and corner law-abiding citizens on the streets.
It's no coincidence that one of Larson's most iconic comics - the explanation of 'anatidaephobia' - hinges on a menacing duck. While Far Side's cow comics are funnier, for our money its ducks are the real stars of the show.
