6 Wordless Far Side Comics That Will Make You Do A Double Take

Published Oct 21, 2026, 3:18 PM EDT Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor. The Far Side and its enigmatic creator, Gary Larson, have a reputation for being hard to figure out. In his own words, Larson called his humor, and The Far Side as a whole, "confusing, obtuse, esoteric, and strange." Often throughout his career, Larson produced cartoons meant to make the reader go, "Wait, what?" Or where it intentionally takes a beat for the punchline to register. In other words, Larson was a master of the double take. Consider how Far Sides were originally published: in newspapers, on the funny pages, with dozens of other cartoons, all fighting for the reader's attention. Like all forms of entertainment, newspaper comics are about grabbing attention, and even The Far Side's biggest critics have to admit that no one produced more attention-grabbing cartoons, especially in the '80s, than Gary Larson. Part of that was a matter of Larson's sensibility, and part of it was style and format. The Far Side was something new, and usually something ridiculous, every single day. Rather than a conventional comic strip, The Far Side was usually a single panel (though Larson often broke this "rule" by subdividing his panel into a sequence of frames) with or without a caption. Omitting a caption was one easy way for the writer/artist to force readers to stop and pay closer attention to his work. There are plenty of wordless, captionless Far Side cartoons that hit readers over the heads with their jokes, so to speak. Visual punchlines that land immediately and get a big laugh. Yet for every one of those there is another panel that will take readers a second, and a second look, to realize what's going on. 6 "Skinny Dipping With A Snake" Take this Far Side snake cartoon for example. The joke is obvious, but maybe only after the reader leans in to take a closer look. The panel depicts a small pond in the middle of the woods. An idyllic setting to go skinny-dipping real quick. No one else is around. No one will know. That's what this guy thinks, anyway. Unfortunately for him, someone else happened to have the exact same idea. And that someone is a snake. The pond is situated in the exact center of the frame. The punchline, such as it is here, is that the man's clothes are lying on the ground to the right of the pond (from the reader's POV), while the snake has shed its skin on the left bank of the pond. It is the kind of absurd equivalence between animals and humans that The Far Side made its bread and butter. The wide eyes of the man help sell the joke, which is just another detail designed for readers to linger over. 5 "A Fly In Your Snorkel" Again, the eyes are crucial to this Far Side comic. In a way, they're the essence of the joke, because they convey what the character can't say: "Uh-oh." He can't talk because he's snorkeling, and a mosquito (at least, from the looks of it, based on Gary Larson's sketch of the bug) has just gotten sucked into his air tube and straight down his throat. The visual gag is subtle. There are four bugs flying overhead, with squiggly lines trailing behind them to signify movement. A fifth trail abruptly curves and disappears down the dude's snorkel. The action is clear, but takes a beat to process. And even if readers get that immediately, there is still this Far Side cartoon's secondary kicker to process. Check the spear in the diver's hand. He's out here spear fishing. In the bottom right corner of the frame is a fish, watching all this go down, having been spared from being speared by the timing of the fisher's misfortune. 4 "Pelican's Big Catch" Last time it was a snorkeler, this time it is a scuba diver. Again, trouble comes at them from above. In this Far Side cartoon, Gary Larson depicts a flock of pelicans at feeding time, diving into the water and scooping up dinner with their extra-large gullets. With one bird having come up with a bit more than it can chew. All the pieces are there in this panel, readers just have to take a few moments to put them all together. Several other pelicans with what can be assumed to be mouthfuls of fish fly around in the background. One is depicted just as it divebombs toward the water. A fish is shown jumping out of the sea, making itself extra appealing prey. But it is the bird, and its catch of the day, in the foreground that get the most attention, naturally. Because a man in a wet suit is crammed uncomfortably in the bird's mouth. And the look on the bird's face suggests it is struggling to fly with so much excess weight. This is less the kind of Far Side joke that goes for laugh-out-loud funny, and more the sort that is designed to leave readers slightly uneasy, or queasy, or scratching their heads, perplexed by the subtlety of the punchline. 3 "Who Caught Who?" This is the Far Side at its simplest, yet simultaneously it can be a bit perplexing. The joke doesn't exactly land right away, which is fair, because it is another one that is set entirely underwater. (An underrated recurring Far Side location, arguably.) The majority of the frame is occupied by a submarine, which is attached by a thin fishing line to a fishing pole. The joke is that the fisher thought they caught the big one, the catch of a lifetime, only for their pole to be pulled out of their hands and dragged out to sea by the submersible vessel. That's the best case scenario, at least. Readers don't see the person who was holding the pole, but they might have been dragged under as well. Once again, consider the borderline between subtle and confusing with a Far Side joke. This isn't exactly a hard joke to parse, but it takes a beat to get across, and more than that, it will leave many readers wondering, "Is there supposed to be something deeper to this that I'm not getting?" To which the answer is: no. 2 "Totem Pole Double Take" With this wordless Far Side cartoon, Gary Larson made the double take the joke itself. This is set up like one of those "can you tell the difference?" sets of images. What changes between the left and the right frames? Well, the indigenous American character sitting in the foreground does a double take themselves, but why? Because the totem pole in the background is making silly faces at them behind their back. Whether that means it is made of real animals pretending to be woodcarvings, or carved sculptures of animals that have come to life, is anybody's guess. When it comes to The Far Side, it could be either/or, but the humor here is in the composition of the panel, and the absurdity of the concept. 1 "The Carrot And The...Hunk Of Meat?" This is it. One of the weirdest, most "What the?" inducing Far Sides ever. In fact, it's a real litmus test for Far Side fandom. Are you in or out on Gary Larson's most ridiculous cartoons after looking at this one? Can you handle the uncertainty that jokes like this might leave you with? Here, Larson depicts a bunch of people on a street corner, going this way and that, all of them led by carrots strung out in front of them on fishing poles stuck to their backs. Weird enough on its own, but then Larson goes one step farther. Coming around the corner is a giant hunk of meat, similarly tied to a string, which is evidently leading a hulking, giant, carnivorous person, whose foot is also just barely visible stepping into frame. Venture all the explanations you want. The point of this Far Side cartoon is to mystify, more than to shock, or surprise, or make laugh. And it achieves that goal in spectacular fashion. Writer Gary Larson Colorist Gary Larson